The Last Book
I’ve never read anything by David Rakoff but I guess I’ll have to start.
The trouble is, I suspect I’ll fall in love, and it’s going to be bitter sweet because as just about everybody knows, David died of cancer last year.
On the weekend The Globe and Mail published a story on David’s last book, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. The story was part eulogy and part biography and part review, and it made me want to go out and read everything Rakoff has written.
I always joke when people say to me, “I just read your last book.” I smile or laugh and say “do you know something I don’t?” Then they correct themselves, or I do it for them as some king of a grammatical service and say “my most recent book, you mean.”
But who knows?
That’s the trouble with writing; it’s never over until it’s over. It’s not like there’s an allotment of ideas for each writer and you use them up and then that’s it. It’s that way when I’m behind my camera too. I bet it’s that way for artists of all mediums.
Edward Abbey, one of my favourite non-fiction writers, always mused about writing The Fat Masterpiece and then retiring on the exorbitant royalties he would receive, smoke evil cigars and contemplate his own genius. But pretty much to the moment of his death he was writing, in his case the sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang called Hayduke Lives (which sort of spoils the first book’s suspense). Abbey admitted it wasn’t a very good book, and it wasn’t, and that he did it for the money; not for him – he knew he was dying when he wrote it – but for his family.
I wonder how that feels? As I read the Globe piece on David Kakoff’s final book, and then the NY Times essay on the same, I wondered how it must have felt for someone so dedicated to literature to know, as he did, that the words he was writing would be his last.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I have a lot of ideas. The truth is I have a lot of ideas but really I’m just trying to find different ways of getting to the main point. The thought that any one book might be the last is deeply unsettling. I guess if that one book, the last one, is truly outstanding, and conveys what the writer hopes to impart his or her readers with, then they could retire or expire knowing they had left the world having done their best work.
But creativity doesn’t seem to work that way. It seems to me that the writer, the photographer, the artist, is always trying to find the perfect words, the perfect light, the perfect shape that expresses how she or he feels about this life, the world, and one another. So we write another book, shoot another sunset, sing another song, paint another canvas or throw another bowl on the wheel because maybe, with each renewed effort, we will create something beautiful or hilarious, touching or disconcerting that says “this is what I wanted to tell you about how I feel.”
And then we do it again.
Knowing that something – a book, a photograph, a play, a sculpture – is going to be the last one could be heartbreaking. It could be overwhelming. It could be a relief too, but a bitter sweet one at best.
I’ll pick up David Rakoff’s new book, and for me it won’t be his last.
