The Grandmother in the Doorway

Some writers spend a career going somewhere. Others spend a career coming back to the same place. Faulkner did the second. Woolf did the second. Marilynne Robinson has done the second for forty years and won every prize a writer can win for the going and never-leaving. The recurring figure — the grandmother in the doorway, the lighthouse at the end of the water — is not a failure of imagination. It may be the most disciplined thing a writer can do.

We were reading, again, the middle section of To the Lighthouse — the “Time Passes” passage in which Mrs. Ramsay dies in a single bracketed clause and the empty house is given ten years of a paragraph — and the thing that struck us was not the famous parenthesis. It was the fact that Woolf had already written this woman before, in Mrs. Dalloway, in The Voyage Out, in the earliest sketches. She had spent a career learning to sit with a certain kind of Englishwoman long enough that when she was ready, she could hand her over to death in a bracket and still make the reader mourn her. The bracket is the confidence of long acquaintance. It is the terminal restraint of a writer who has already spent thousands of pages proving the case, and no longer has to.

Faulkner did the same with a place. Yoknapatawpha was not a stroke of genius. It was a decision, made in Flags in the Dust and adhered to until his death. To choose to write, again and again, about a single county in Mississippi is to accept, up front, the accusation of narrowness — the same accusation Emily Dickinson accepted about the second-floor bedroom in Amherst, the same accusation Chekhov accepted about the provincial doctor’s house. What the accusation misses is that a writer who returns to the same ground is not repeating themselves. They are learning what the ground can bear. Each new book adds a layer to what the previous book made possible. Sartoris in the first novel is preparation for the Sartoris of Absalom, Absalom!. The reader who has followed him grieves in three dimensions where a first-time reader could only grieve in two.

What is at stake here, we think, is the case for recurrence itself. We live in a moment that tells writers — and especially writers who have not yet made their reputations — that novelty is the coin of the realm. Every book must be new. Every voice must be a departure. The MFA workshop trades in the surprising sentence rather than the earned one, and the market rewards the writer who reinvents themselves at every step.

We suspect the market is wrong. The reader you want, we think, is the reader who returns to a body of work the way one returns to a house one has known for years. What such a reader wants is not to be surprised by the front hall. What they want is to walk in, hang up their coat, and find the same grandmother in the doorway, saying almost the same thing. The almost is where the whole art lives.

The grandmother in the doorway is the writer’s method. Coming back to her is not laziness. It is the slow, honest work of finding out what her doorway means.

— The Editors