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Overview
When it was first published, Andre Dubus said of The Lights of Earth, "Like her stories, it's masterly. Its central character is a woman, Ilona Lewis, who confronts loss of earthly love. But Ilona's experience is far more complex than losing a man because he has become a celebrity. It involves the hearts of all of us seeking the lights of earth, the soul's blessing in its long, dark night."
Forsaken by her lover as he gains fame as a novelist, Ilona is stirred by the need to remember the brother she left behind long ago. Revealing the precious worth of life that emerges from the depths of loss, The Lights of Earth is a deeply moving exploration of the soul and a masterwork of style and psychological acuity from one of the most celebrated voices in contemporary fiction.
Gina Berriault’s work as a storywriter of great psychological empathy and extraordinary elegance and subtlety was widely praised at the end of her life and, with this reissue of one of her more celebrated short novels, her work can be discovered by a new generation of readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640095229 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2023 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.51(w) x 8.24(h) x 0.42(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Years after the night of that strange little party her memory played a trick on her. Her memory set him among the others, the guest of honor who heard every word, who saw every gesture and every expression on every face. But he wasn't there. He wasn't even expected that night. He must have been still in Spain or New York or down in Los Angeles or over the continent on his way back to San Francisco. He must have been up in the sky, somewhere over all, as the suddenly famous ones seem to be.
The name of the couple whose house it was, the house where she had not been before and was never to enter again, seemed of no consequence and she didn't quite hear it. Later, when she knew the name of the wife, she was unable to say that name aloud. An ordinary name to anyone else, for her it was the shattering presence of the woman herself. The couple had asked Claud, a friend of Martin--the guest of honor who wasn't there--to bring Ilona along. Just by her presence and even without a word she might tell them something about the man who was her lover. Even though he was to appear soon, any day, their impatience threw open the door to her as wide as it would have been had he accompanied her. They must have been hoping for someone like him to come into their lives, each one's hope so ardently secret from the other that he must have seemed inevitable.
The oval glass in the oak door of the Victorian house was etched so profusely with grapes and leaves and tendrils it served as an impenetrable silver mist that with utmost graciousness denied you a view of what went on inside. A lamp or a chandelier in some far room glinted off the entwined grapes and turned them gold, now one and now another, a matter of how you shifted your feet or your eyes.
Claud had ridiculed the host on the way over, but now at the last moment the desire to be presentable forced him to comb down his hair, tossed by the wind. He wore a sportcoat with only one button missing and each pocket held a pack of cigarettes to protect him from his perverse need to smoke the couple's. Ilona had refused at first to come along. She had come only because the couple's curiosity about the man who was her lover stirred her own curiosity about something she wanted not to think about at all--a premonition of loss.
Grasping Claud's arm, shaking Ilona's right hand with his left, the host drew them inside, the three awkwardly linked. The host's jeans were faded, his hiking boots were grayed by rough use, and the most humble garment of all was his gauzy shirt from India. In those years, the early seventies, some affluent young were imitating the poor of the world. The shirt, however, failed to lessen his chest's prosperity. It was as obdurate as all other wealthy chests, narrow or broad, that she'd slipped by or asked something of, a job or simple directions, or brought something to, a tray of whatever was ordered.
Beyond the wide doorway to the dining room, the several persons lounging around the long table were like actors on a stage, made small by their surroundings and each striving to be seen and heard. Except one, who had no need to strive--the one among the women who was beautiful, and Ilona knew at once that the woman was the wife of the man who was guiding Claud and herself toward the table and knew that she was the eventual one, the one who takes away the lover, the one who is a reward in a time of rewards, and she wished for herself a time when presentiment of loss would never bother her because she would be wise enough to know that loss was as natural as breathing.
Ilona, seated across from the woman, looked instead at the couple's son, close to three years old, who sat elevated by cushions next to his mother, turning his gaze from one face to another, bending over his plate to see who was speaking at the end of the table, to see who was laughing. The little boy bore his resemblance to his mother like a gift whose value he knew about. His eyes, like his mother's, seemed balanced by serenity, by the trust that all he was to desire of life would be granted, and Ilona called upon reason to rescue her from her archaic view of the world that saw it divided between those who appeared to be blessed and those who appeared to be forsaken, and reason failed. She tried then to imagine at this table a great writer of the past, say a century ago, someone who had observed compassionately women who went unnoticed, but if that figure, whoever he was, were really to be at this table, absorbed again in life, his gaze would be on the beautiful wife, amazingly like a woman who had enthralled him a hundred years ago.
The host at the head of the table was accusing his guests of envy, envy of the man somewhere up in the air. "Severe envy. It's worse than hepatitis. More people die of it. Nausea, insomnia. But the worst symptom is impotence."
"You know that for a fact?" someone asked, and someone else laughed.
"Impotence," the host repeated. "Of the mind. Of the hand that holds your very own little pen. Look at Claud. Claud hasn't written one word in ten years and he'd like you to think he couldn't care less, he's through. But look. Overnight his hair's turned white and the whites of his eyes have turned green. Claud, let everybody see your eyes."
Claud was smiling, smoking a cigarette of his own. His hair was as dark as ever and his eyes as clear as they ever were. "If I'm dying it's not from envy. It's from what that Frenchman, Peguy, said--You die of your whole life. Not just one shock."
The host brought up a Time from under his chair, already open to the photograph of the absent guest of honor, and held up the magazine for all to see. Ilona had read the review weeks ago and the other guests must also have read it then, but everybody complyingly raised their eyes. Except the wife, who was placing tidbits from her own plate onto her son's plate, while the child gazed up anxiously at the picture, afraid of missing something so important to his father.
"One of those faces that haven't been lived in yet," the host said. "He's thirty-four and he looks nineteen and he'll look nineteen when he's ninety, God help him."
"I think ..." A girl, afraid to contest with the host, appeared to be talking to her plate. "I think he deserves all the praise he's been getting."
Down came the magazine, down beside his plate, and his hand came down flat on the small picture. "I agree, I agree. That's why I've called you all together. To sing his praises. We'll practice every night, we'll gather here every night, and the night he walks in the door a heavenly choir shall greet him."
Like falsely obedient children who've bested a parent they took up their forks and wineglasses again, complacently silent. When the array of delicatessen delights on each plate was one or two bites less, the chatter began again--nothing about the novel itself but everything about those persons who were welcoming Martin Vandersen into the world: critics, and the movie producer who had bought the screen rights to the novel, and the director at whose villa on the Costa del Sol Martin had been a guest, and the actor who was sought for the lead. "Sought," cried the host, staring wildly upward. "One lousy actor sought like in `they sought God,' like in `they sought justice."' But though they pleasurably interrupted one another with details about the lives of those legendary persons who were surrounding Martin at this birth, they appeared to be baffled over why they were so affected by somebody else's recognition, somebody else's entry into the light. She saw the bafflement in their eyes and heard it in their voices.
Out in the living room, the host sat down at Ilona's feet, took off his boots, and attempted the lotus position. Apart from them, the others were talking loudly and his wife was upstairs, putting the child to bed.
"She had a lover in Italy last year," he said, low. "A good man. A fine sculptor. American, living in Florence. We would have been great friends if he hadn't been her lover. Your Martin reminds me of him. I met Martin a couple of days before he left, ran into him and Claud, and his resemblance to her last year's lover was remarkable. The looks, the wit." His glance slipped sideways on its way up to her face. "What's he like? I mean when you get to know him."
Bearing a tray of decanters and goblets, his wife came into the room, and the question seemed asked for her. They would have to answer the question themselves, each with a secret answer.
The man at her feet rocked back and forth, gripping his ankles. "How long have you known him?"
"Oh, four years. " The number of years for lovers was supposed to mean something, a measurement of depth or truth, but numbers were revelations only for scientists. The things she knew about the lovers she'd never tell this man, and one was that love was never certain--who but herself thought it could be?--but that under the uncertainty of love lay the certainty of comradeship. What else wouldn't she tell? That when Martin had reminded her a time was to come when he would be elsewhere, she had listened reasonably and amenably, but they had pained her, those reminders, and once, afraid that if their time together was without love it was a wasted time, she had gone so far as to quote Camus. "You enrich the future by giving all to the present." Because she disparaged her own words, because her own words lacked persuasion, she relied on time-honored words. After that heavy-laden quote he did give up his warnings and reminders, perhaps believing that she already knew about endings and about elsewhere. But he was not persuaded to give all to the present.
Massaging his calves as though easing a cramp, the host asked, "Ah, you live together?"
"Yes, we live together." Her answer appeared to soothe him, he seemed to accept it as assurance that they would continue to live together and his wife and himself also continue to live together, with no outside interference. "Though sometimes we lived apart."
The man at her feet knew very little, probably, about makeshift dwellings that weren't your own and that convinced you of a destiny to be always without possessions and never even to desire them. So he might be unable to see that the way they lived together was another bond that made them kindred even apart. Six weeks ago, when Martin was in Spain or somewhere in Europe, the house across the bay, in the little town at the foot of the mountain, the house where they had lived together with her child, was sold, and she had found a small apartment in the city, hoping that when Martin returned they would find a larger one together.
"Claud tells me Martin used to live in a basement out by the ocean. Claud says the house was riddled with termites and their eggs or turds rained down on your friend's manuscripts. He said that in the flat upstairs the fleas were like a living carpet and when Martin went up there once to use the phone the fleas were all over him as soon as he stepped inside. He turned and ran."
Any creature, she thought, a flea, a fly, no matter how microscopically small, that's on or near a person who's become famous, joins in the celebration.
"Claud says Martin had only two plates and he put the cooking pot on the table. Claud says he kept his manuscripts in a grocery box and a mouse made herself a nest in there and gave birth, and he didn't know it and kept piling up the pages." A pause. "Was it deliberate? I mean, was it a show of poverty, like `See, I was poor and now I deserve the rewards'? "
"It's what's called necessary poverty," she said. If it was an attempt at saintly asceticism so that when recognition came along nobody would want to deny him its rewards, she didn't want to know about it. She didn't want to know his superstitions, just as she didn't want to know her own. Superstitions, like clues to dark confusions, were too much to know about anyone and yourself.
"Claud says they've torn down the house and put up a motel. Too bad. What they should have done--the city, I mean, or the state, or even the federal government--was buy the house, restore it, and put up a bronze plaque that says Martin Vandersen lived here, and the dates. If they'd only known. And turn the basement into a museum. The pot and the two plates on the table, a stuffed mouse in the manuscripts, the bed made, the covers turned back like he's away on a journey but he's coming home any day now. You've seen pictures of Tolstoy's study? Everything just where it was when the great man died."
If Martin were present, and if she were to take him aside and point out to him this man's fear of him, this ridicule in the guise of praise, then Martin, who wanted never to suspect anybody, would say What's there to fear about me?
Over across the blue Persian carpet, the wife was pouring brandy, and Ilona saw again how each particular of beauty, the beauty of any person, of any object, of anything on earth or in the heavens, leads you on, mesmerized, to all particulars, and she saw again how a woman's beauty seems to pardon that woman in advance for any betrayal, any transgression, for grief brought to others.
"If he's got no place to go," the man at her feet was saying, "he can stay with us until he finds a place. Plenty of room here," pointing heavenward. "Come on, I'll show you," leaping up, leaving his boots behind.
Climbing the stairs at his side, she saw how eager his feet in socks appeared, eager to run and prepare the way for an invasion of his privacy by the man up in the night sky.
On the middle floor they passed the half-open door of the master bedroom and she kept herself from glancing in. She might glance in on her way down. When you were on your way down you were already on your way out, like a trespasser discovered in the upper regions.
Gently he pushed the door to the boy's room a bit more open, motioning for her to step just inside and no farther. The child in the large bed, the lamp with its rosy shade, the shadows--it was like a very large oil painting with somebody in it preciously small.
"Does he resemble me?"
She had seen no resemblance at the table. It was as if the mother and the child had requested the artist to leave the father out of the picture.
"He isn't mine, you know." A pause. "You know about it? His father was Joseph Neely, the poet. They'd run away. He died of a heart attack in Greece, on one of those idyllic islands. She was in a terrible state. Grief, you know, and pregnant, and I went there. We cried together. My God, we held each other and cried for a whole day and a night." His hoarse whisper, his feet in socks--he was like a trespasser himself.
Up another flight, the last staircase uncarpeted, and the room they entered at the back of this floor contained only a narrow bed, a straight-back chair, a small table. No rug, no shade over the ceiling globe.
"If he lived that way in his basement he'll like this room the way it is. We haven't got to it yet. We'll find him some termites if they'll make him feel at home."
Was he expecting the guest to stay forever? Years later, when one evening she was passing through this neighborhood, the house that she did not want to identify for certain in the row of stolid and stately houses caught her eye and roused again the emotions of that time of loss. The host's fear of this guest who would stay on and on had been realized. The house had become the guest's, though the guest wasn't there anymore and hadn't stayed long at all, and the couple and the child weren't there anymore, and the house belonged to somebody else.
Restlessly he moved around the room, a host expecting one last guest before the festivities can begin, and she thought: He throws open all doors and begs loss to enter. Had he brought her into this almost bare room so that she might give him evidence in advance, just by her presence, of how his life was to be changed by the guest who would soon be lying in the narrow bed, sitting down with them to their meals, reclining on their couches, lying in their tub? The guest would even play the grand piano downstairs, the accomplished musician that he was, and a raconteur besides, whose every word would be given rapt attention. Once you leap out of obscurity so many talents come to light.
Awkwardly, as though embarrassed, he faced her from a corner. "You know I write myself? Claud must have told you. That's my study, the other door."
Was he waiting for her to ask him what his novel was about? She never asked that question of anyone and sidestepped it when it was asked of her, and even if he were pleased to answer she chose not to see in his eyes, as he told her, all that pleading with reality to yield up its meanings.
"It's about them," he said. "It's about this poet who runs off with somebody's wife and it's no bed of roses. Some of them die of joy after twenty years but some of them, like Neely, drop off fast even though she's doing all she can to make him the happiest man in the world. It might have been too much for his heart, he might have wanted to be free of what he'd wanted so much." He glanced at her sharply to see if he were truly heard. "She doesn't know what my novel's about, she thinks it's about my childhood in Iran. My father was an oil exec. I tell her Scheherazade tales and she thinks that's what it's all about. Something else she doesn't know and that's the guilt I feel, stuck in that room like I'm in solitary for committing some crime, and the crime is what I'm doing in there. I'm not supposed to touch them, I'm not supposed to get all wound up in it. It's like I've been warned to leave them alone. In other words, leave life alone. Die of it if you want to, but don't presume to know how it is with anybody else."
He came toward her so fast, switching off the light so fast, that she was forced to step aside to allow him to leave the room first.
On the way down she glanced into their bedroom. A lamp was on and she saw a wide bed covered over with a pure white spread, she saw a deep red Oriental carpet and an antique chair draped with a black silk Spanish shawl. On the nights when their guest was to lie alone, up there on the top floor, would he know that the woman lying beside her husband longed to lie beside him, instead? Ilona, glancing in, was reminded of herself at twelve, when every night before sleep she imagined a different being for herself from head to foot, and that fervent concentration on every particular (from an actress up on the screen--her eyes; from a girl in school--her mouth; from a woman passed on the street--her hair) was to bring about a miracle. When she woke up in the morning she'd be the girl she'd created the night before. The woman who was embraced in that broad bed, the woman loved by many men--was she someone whom the girl, Ilona, would have chosen to become, back on those nights of dreaming herself up?
When they came down the last stairs and the room with its company was out before them, she was still in the past, the street urchin with the tangled hair and torn dress and the shame over herself, the child gazing at the scene through a window, not wanting in, only wondering why so much light, why so many things reflecting light--silver and mirrors and glass and jewels and eyes--were always on the other side of the pane. The wife looked up at them and seemed to know all that her husband had told Ilona, and the face of the woman imprinted itself in her memory, an infliction, a trial, a dazzling fact of life.
The host brought Ilona a cognac and she stood with the other guests around him. He was lightly drunk, transported by his performance. "Old Fyodor, here's old Fyodor back in Russia. Here he is, knocking his shins on heavy Russian furniture again. He's just come back from the gambling spas, Baden-Baden, linden trees, fountains, roulette wheels, chandeliers like heavenly constellations over his little demented head, and here he is and he's under contract to that swine."
"Pauline lay around naked," Claud interrupted. "She lay around and wouldn't let him touch her. All across Europe. The girl he went gambling with, he couldn't touch her." And someone laughed, a short derisive laugh.
"Anna, I'm talking about Anna, the girl he married. Anna comes after Paulina. I don't know what the hell happened to Paulina. Anna was his second wife. The first wife was insane and then she died. You ever think how many of the greats married insane women? Well, here he is, I'll start over again. Here he is back in Russia and he's under contract to that swine and he's got to hand over another novel or else he forfeits his rights to all his works so far. He's got one month and not one word."
Ilona saw that his wife had wandered away to the stereo and, her back turned to the group, was selecting an album. The low voice of a French male singer was heard, and the woman bowed her head to listen.
"One lousy month and not one word. Then this friend says he knows about this class where the girls are learning some sort of hieroglyphics that's just been invented. Shorthand? What the hell's that? So old Fyodor asks the instructor to send over a student, and he sends over this girl, twenty years old...." One fast step to the side and he was the girl, gazing in awe at the space vacated by Fyodor. "Are you Mr. Dostoevski?" A girl's tremolo. Jumping back into Fyodor's space, he brought up from his chest a weary bass voice. "My dear Anna, I've got one month, my dear, one lousy month to get this novel together." Then he was himself again, his voice his own. "You ever see pictures of her? Tolstoy told her they were look-alikes, Fyodor and her. They were. You can see for yourself. Same eyes, same stare. Or her eyes got to imitating his, she was looking into them all the time. Anyway, she took it all down in hieroglyphics every day, and every night she went home to Mama. They got it all together. So old Fyodor--everybody was old at forty in those days--asked her to marry him. My God, she loved him for the rest of his life, even when he pawned the baby's shoes for gambling money."
Sweat shone on his face, he was a medium on the verge of collapse after conversing with that couple on the Other Side. His clownish act, his exertion stirred Ilona's sympathy. Was it his way of telling his wife that if only she would stay by him, they too would be remembered by the world? Now that his performance was over, the seductively aloof voice of the French singer was heard by all.
When the guests were putting on their coats, the host, waving his arms, called for silence. "My friends, I'd like to sing a little song for you. It's a song composed especially for the remarkable man who was unable to be with us tonight because he's in demand everywhere else." With a rapturous voice he sang his variation of a song heard everywhere, "Mar-tin in the sky-eye with diamonds," while everyone listened dutifully like children taught a song to sing together. Except his wife, who listened incuriously as if not listening.
It was then, at last, that her eyes met Ilona's--while her husband gazed up through the ceiling at the starry heavens and sang his one line--and Ilona saw the woman's awareness of her, she saw the other woman's curiosity about what she, Ilona, meant or had meant or would mean in the future to the man who was to appear any day now, any moment, out of the sky.
What People are Saying About This
Of writers whose work I know -- my generation, anybody's generation -- Gina Berrriault's work is non pareil. Just simply wonderful.
Each of Gina Berriault's stories contain a world beautifully illuminated by the light of the life within it. Her writing, line for line, is the most emotionally precise I know and her stories are among the wisest and most heartbreaking in American fiction.