Up From the Depths by Aaron Sachs

Author:Aaron Sachs [Sachs, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691215419
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Both Lewis and Sophia sank into their grief. They both had special intimacies with Geddes, but they also fought with him, and like all thoughtful parents they questioned many of their parental decisions. So guilt mingled with the pain of loss that fall and winter, as they looked through family albums and reread letters, wondering if they had been too free with Geddes, or too strict, or if he had suffered from neglect when they turned their attention to antifascist activism. “On one of our brief afternoon walks the other day,” Lewis wrote, in December, “… Sophy and I were discussing the quality of our lives during the last half dozen years.… We both agree that, far more than the fact that we were ‘aging’ and too often ill, the pressure of the outside world, the anxieties and dangers connected with the widening triumphs of tyranny and the necessities of war, have robbed our domestic life of the fulfillment it might have had, and of the gaiety and animation it might have afforded to both our children, who instead lived under our lengthening shadows.”4

This was an evasion of sorts, but it was better to blame the war than each other—something they were unable to avoid completely as they considered Geddes’s teenage struggles in light of their own temperamental differences. Sophia and Geddes had stormed at each other passionately, but they were always close; Lewis had maintained a somewhat mystified distance, showing his deep love with perhaps too much subtlety (he was also absorbed in his own affairs, both literary and amorous). Almost immediately after they got word of Geddes’s death, Lewis had the idea of writing a book about him, and asked for Sophia’s help, since she was the keeper of family records. But she wasn’t yet ready for so direct a confrontation with their loss; they had another child to raise, after all. Grief sometimes brought the family closer together, but it could also exacerbate resentments. By the following summer, Lewis had to admit that “Geddes’ death has torn our lives asunder in more than one way. One of the ways in which I least suspected it would is in increasing the disturbance between Sophy and me.”5 It was as if they had each come separately to Father Mapple’s New Bedford chapel, where every whaleman or whaleman’s widow was “purposely sitting apart from the other,” each with a “silent grief” that seemed “insular and incommunicable.”6

While Sophia focused on day-to-day practical realities, Lewis wavered between efforts to work through his anguish and to distract himself. Most immediately, he wrote poems. They were all about war and death; a few were published, as Lewis noted, “despite their imperfections.”7 One bore the title “For Those Bereaved in War,” and its refrain—“Death comes to every household”—suggests Mumford’s compulsion to reckon with his trauma in a way that might be helpful to other members of a war-torn society.8 He was trying to be true to his own urgings in The Condition of Man, that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.