Redemption through art has become a cliche, as though anyone’s life could be explained and atoned for by the writing of a song, painting of a picture, or telling of a story. Marjorie Sandor, in this collection of stories and essays, has not taken that easy way out. She never asks for, or even mentions the word redemption. But what she has done is to remind us of our lost innocence, our shared humanity, and of the power of The Story to illuminate our lives.
The Night Gardener: A Search for Home is a breathtakingly intimate collection of 20 meditations on modern life. Sandor, who teaches writing at Oregon State University, hasn’t exactly opened her veins and written these essays in her own blood — that’s far too melodramatic a metaphor for this quiet but powerful little book. But the effect is similarly moving.
In writing that is clear and direct, deeply felt yet never sentimental, Sandor sketches the outlines of life in late twentieth century America. She and her family are adrift on every passing current, rootless, desperately seeking connection to both the natural world and each other. She and they struggle for meaning and community through music, literature, fly-fishing, restless migration from one end of the country to the other and back again, and finally, gardening.
In the end they fail at most of these endeavors in one way or another. And yet somehow, we’re left with hope — in the dignity of the elderly, the scrappy survival skills of seemingly tender children, and the annual regenerative greening of the earth.
Born into an upwardly mobile secular Jewish family in Southern California, Sandor feels a permanent outsider — from mainstream culture and even from her own family. She never experiences the family’s most cherished memories of its first home except in snapshots, because they had to move to larger quarters when she came along unexpectedly. She takes her first steps into a life of writing, and away from the shallow life of Los Angeles in the Sixties, when a family friend starts buying her classic books: Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Melville.
“Receiving these, I felt like a character in a book myself, a book about a young girl who will grow up and surprise everyone …”
In “Florestan and Eusebius,” Sandor reveals how as an adolescent, she harbored fantasies of a tragic and illicit love between her mother and the book-buying man, her father’s best friend, whom she knew as “Uncle” Maury. Once, when the mother exiles them from the kitchen, the two stand over the figure of her father asleep on the livingroom couch, “his hands folded across his chest like a pharaoh in his final repose, an imposing monument to actual, unromanticized fatherhood.”
Her book is full of similar deft touches and turns of phrases that are revealing, but never showy.
The essays move quickly into Sandor’s adulthood, as she and her husband move to Florida and struggle again as outsiders who never quite fit in.
“My rush to connect this new place with my childhood home turned out to be rather like the last fruit of Eden: irresistible, a bad idea, and the necessary beginning of my education,” she writes in “On Leaving Florida.”
She takes up fly-fishing, in which even the most WASPish males must serve a long and arduous apprenticeship; as an urban Jewish woman, she struggles perpetually to grasp the sport’s arcane knowledge and cabalistic rituals.
It’s only when they move to Oregon with their five-year-old daughter that they begin to sink real roots into a place. But not without continued struggles. The book’s title essay details her effort to learn gardening in order to preserve the lush and offbeat plant life with which their home’s previous owner had surrounded the house.
The former owner shows up, uninvited if not exactly unwelcome, at a New Year’s party after Sandor’s first summer of trial-and-error gardening. “I saw her every once in a while pick up a vase or a book and turn it carefully in her hands in a way that made me think dimly of amulets and little dolls impaled with pins.” Eventually, Sandor learns to make her own choices about what plants to grow and where. But there’s a serpent in this Eden — the age-old one. She reveals, simply, “I fell in love when I shouldn’t have.”
The remainder of this memoir of essays, in lesser hands, could become merely one more lurid kiss-and-tell confessional. But Sandor’s sure touch as a writer never deserts her, even when she’s laying open her hurt, confusion and near despair as her family is split asunder. The garden remains her central metaphor.
“In my old garden the leaves gather and whisper; they pile up near the front stoop,” she writes in “The Book of Changes.” “If they had eyes, they would look on me with the same raw unease I saw in my husband’s eyes that summer, and in the eyes of so many of our friends, veiling their own ripped places, hiding the bitter taste of old sorrows awakened by this act committed so nearby.”
In “Solomon’s Blanket,” she writes about the agonizing details of severing a household, symbolized by their daughter’s fuzzy, threadbare old security blanket. How can any parent face — much less write about — a child who describes the empty spot between her heart and her stomach that has developed since she became the subject of a joint custody agreement? Sandor somehow carries on with her life and her story, unflinchingly revealing her own desperate desire to somehow fill that empty place in her daughter’s heart. She resists the temptation to try to fill that hollow place with a pet, and realizes once again the power of folklore, creation myths and similar stories to help us slay our fiercest dragons.
Finally, Sandor returns to her old hometown, to the home of the aging Mexican-American woman who was her family’s housekeeper when Marjorie was a child. She takes along a tape recorder and has “Nana” retell the old yarns she heard while growing up, tales of the untamed life in the Eden that was California, before the arrival of the Anglos with their parking lots and amusement parks and freeways.
“I need something from her: not forgiveness, exactly, but her wide acceptance of human passions, their secrets and reversals and ironies; the way she never ends a story with a neat moral message, or judges a character too quickly. The way she never judges at all.”
These essays and stories touched me in that empty place that I, like her daughter, have inside myself. We all have such a place, I think, where fears come from in the middle of the night and keep us awake. Fears that the damage we have done to others has irreparably split them somehow, like the child in Solomon’s story. Fears that the people we love will live the rest of their lives with dark, empty places in their own hearts because we, in our humanness and frailty, have let them down. I’m comforted by Sandor’s achingly frank admissions, to know that I am not alone in my clumsy attempts to find love, acceptance, roots, community — a place to belong and find my own story.
Marjorie Sandor flaunts no wisdom, only the bravest kind of faith, that her art and her humanity will somehow get her through those dark winters of the soul, and into another spring of hope. The Night Gardener is an unobtrusively brilliant little book, a quietly confident masterpiece of the storytelling craft.
(The Lyons Press, 1999)
