Here But Not Here: A Love Story - Hardcover

Ross, Lillian

 
9780375501197: Here But Not Here: A Love Story
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375501193 ISBN 13: 9780375501197
Verlag: Random House, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

In this fascinating and beautiful memoir, the renowned New Yorker writer Lillian Ross tells a remarkable love story of the passionate life she shared for forty years with William Shawn, The New Yorker's famous editor.

"All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it, so I would have to say that I had an intrinsically normal life for over four decades with William Shawn. . . . I have a lasting sense of the normalcy of it all.  It was a normalcy that Bill Shawn was able to create for himself and for me against all normal odds."

Shawn was married, yet Ross and Shawn created a home together a dozen blocks south of the Shawns' apartment, raised a child, and lived with discretion. Their lives intertwined from the 1950s until Shawn's death, in 1992. Ross describes how they met and the intense connection between them; how Shawn worked with some of the best writers of the period; how, to escape their developing liaison, Ross moved to Hollywood, and there wrote the famous pieces that became Picture, the classic story of the making of a movie--John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage--only to return to New York and to the relationship. The love of Shawn and Ross for each other made it impossible for them ever to part.  
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This book is a gem, an exquisitely told real-life story more potent than fiction.

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Aus dem Klappentext

inating and beautiful memoir, the renowned New Yorker writer Lillian Ross tells a remarkable love story of the passionate life she shared for forty years with William Shawn, The New Yorker's famous editor.<br><br>"All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it, so I would have to say that I had an intrinsically normal life for over four decades with William Shawn. . . . I have a lasting sense of the normalcy of it all. It was a normalcy that Bill Shawn was able to create for himself and for me against all normal odds." <br><br>Shawn was married, yet Ross and Shawn created a home together a dozen blocks south of the Shawns' apartment, raised a child, and lived with discretion. Their lives intertwined from the 1950s until Shawn's death, in 1992. Ross describes how they met and the intense connection between them; how Shawn worked with some of the

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While confiding to me desperate thoughts about himself, he still would tell me how lucky we were to be in whatever day or whatever hour or whatever instant we were in together.
He would say he could not go outside in a heavy storm, rain or snow, or in a deep freeze. We went ice-skating at Grossinger's. He was able, surprisingly, to stretch his limits.
I was completely occupied with thoughts about myself. I was going to do the work I loved. I didn't want anything else. I was ecstatic.
We walked, arm in arm, all over the city. One afternoon Bill was wearing his sporty cap when a street photographer snapped our picture. It was about four o'clock; Bill always called it his "hour of hope."

CHAPTER 1

AS WE WERE

All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it, so I would have to say that I had an intrinsically normal life for over four decades with William Shawn, the late editor of The New Yorker. We loved each other. We remained in love with each other until the day he died, unexpectedly, on December 8, 1992. We signed off every telephone call, every casual parting, every "good night"--including that of the night before his death--with "I love you." From the first instance of his open declaration of love, Bill Shawn continued to say it and to make me feel his love. I learned to respond with the same word. "Love" isn't a word I take lightly or tire of today.
My life became both turbulent and magical as it changed from my initial role as a single-minded reporter and writer into what became everything else I was alive for. I started out seemingly unsuited to be entrusted with my additional role. But I wound up possessing it, and with it, I was given the greatest satisfaction I know of. I have a lasting sense of the normalcy of it all. It was a normalcy that Bill Shawn was able to create for himself and for me against all normal odds.

Our life together did not feel ordinary, however. Bill Shawn was incapable of engaging in the ordinary. He was incapable of imagining the ordinary, whether he was composing a passage to be incorporated into a writer's story for The New Yorker, or a gift card, or a poem, or a letter of love. He was deeply romantic, and in giving voice to his feelings in traditional ways, he managed to say "I love you" so that it sounded fresh. He was my steady collaborator, both personally, in the life we made together, and professionally, from the time I was a young writer on his magazine. Since his death, my understanding of him and my wonder at him have broadened, and I find that our feelings for each other are still having their say. They touch and affect every aspect of my work and of my actions, including the telling of this story. I see it whole. And I see it in focus.

The scene is our living room:

It is a beautiful, mild, early September afternoon in 1987. Bill is in his seventies. I am in my sixties. He is quite bald, with a dark, substantial fringe of hair, carefully barbered, at the base of his skull. My hair is silver, curly, and cut short. We have similar faces--round, with high coloring. His eyes are pure light blue; mine are green. It is about six months after he left his job at The New Yorker and I went with him. We are in the apartment we found together about thirty years earlier, in a then brand-new building. It is on the twelfth floor; this had been our joint choice, notwithstanding his lifelong claustrophobia, his fear of heights, and his terror in most elevators. He lived "within limits," he would say. He had never been able to fly in a plane. On a highway, he once explained to me, he had to be sure there was an exit nearby. If he was caught in a traffic jam, he would grow silent and rigid. Once, when we were in a car, halted in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a road in New York City's Central Park, we had to get out and walk to the street. He would say he could not go outside in a heavy storm, rain or snow, or in a deep freeze. I discovered that he was able, surprisingly, to stretch his limits.

Our apartment is located about half a mile south of the one he lives in with his wife, Cecille. They were married in 1928, the day after he turned twenty-one. By 1958, when Bill and I chose this apartment, we had already been together, in other rooms, for several years. He and I had agreed we would not keep our liaison a secret from Cecille. When Bill told her about it, they talked for weeks, and then for months, with each other--an agonizing time for both of them--and then she made her unshakable decision: she would stay in the marriage, and he would make the logistical arrangements with her that our life together called for. Now, in 1987, Bill and Cecille have three grown children, and I have a son in his last year of college to whom, since his birth, Bill has been like a devoted parent. He has never considered divorcing his wife, and I have never considered asking him to. Whatever the circumstances in his marriage, Bill not only worried about Cecille, he loved her and would go on loving her, but he felt driven to make his life with me, and I have never doubted that this place has been our home.

Since we no longer have an office at The New Yorker to go to, we are spending a good deal of time together alone in the apartment. We have tried working in a nearby library and in a friend's office, but mostly we like being at home, which looks much the same as it has for years. Bill has always decorated our rooms, and I defer to him completely in matters of taste. Our first piece of furniture, a Danish teakwood rocking chair, is in this living room, which is large, sunny, bright, and simple, with picture windows at one end. We are looking out at a clear sky of pale blue, the color he loved. A beige-silk-upholstered sofa is against a wall, with lamps beside it.

A Steinway upright in ebony, with matching chair, stands against the opposite wall. Bill's brown leather briefcase, scuffed and bulging, rests, unopened, in a corner of the sofa. Bookshelves are filled with classics: Bill's favorites--Turgenev, Proust, Joyce, Jefferson, Fitzgerald, Shelley, Musil. My favorites include Gogol, Keats, Kafka, and Salinger. We have old-fashioned record albums along with CDs, and we play a lot of Duke Ellington, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Mozart.

Between the books and the records stands a framed color photograph of Bill, taken in 1966, sitting on our sofa with his arm around my son, Erik, barefoot, at age five months; Bill is wearing tortoiseshell glasses, and he is reading The New Yorker to Erik. The photograph is one of the scores of photographs I've taken of them with a Leica Reflex camera given to me by Bill. Every time I pick up this camera, I think of how he said, as he handed it to me, that I should record for both of us what only I might see.
On the shelves are a few elegant items: an antique Chinese vase of a light shade of blue matching the color of Bill's eyes (he brought it back from a quick trip to Chicago, his hometown); a French porcelain teapot circa 1800 (one of his rare extravagances). A round dining table, covered with a white lacy cloth, is set with an English floral teapot and matching cups and saucers. Bill has always loved observing the custom of afternoon tea. Delicate Italian chairs of cherry wood and cane are at the table. The table's centerpiece is a basket of pale yellow tea roses, which Bill sends over regularly. Thirty-seven years earlier, he gave me similar flowers in a similar basket for the first time, saying that he wanted to call our friendship by its right name: love.

At that time, I found the flowers and what he said surprising and disconcerting. I found them frightening. I didn't want to recognize their meaning.
On this September afternoon in 1987, Bill is wearing a dark-blue cashmere suit with matching vest, a blue-and-white checked shirt, a dark-blue knitted tie. He is slightly built, high-complexioned, a bit paunchy around the middle, somewhat round-shouldered, and short (about five six), and he has big feet, encased in plain black shoes. Most of the time, whatever the season, he feels cold. On hot days, when most men are in shirtsleeves, he wears his usual warm dark-blue cashmere three-piece suit. About twenty years ago, he would wear a brown tweed suit, or a cotton seersucker suit in the heat of a New York summer, but now he stays with dark blue the year around. Outdoors, well before the onset of winter and into late spring, he wears a heavy alpaca-lined-and-collared coat, a muffler, and heavy gloves. Over his vest he wears a dark-green cashmere sleeveless sweater. He wears the same battered and soiled felt hat the year around, including steaming August days. (I gave the hat to him at least a dozen years earlier.)

The picture windows look out across a wide street to a red brick apartment house. Both of us like to look at what is going on in that house. Children are jumping on a bed in one apartment; in another, a fat black woman in a white uniform is sitting in a window, smoking a cigar; in still another, a middle-aged man in tights is doing aerobics in front of a television screen. A clock on a bookshelf near our piano indicates the time--almost four o'clock. It is the hour Bill loves. He calls it the hour of hope. For him, it conjures up romantically dressed and happy men, women, and children seated at a round table on a green lawn next to an English garden and having scones with large helpings of sweet butter and jam. We have gone often to the nearby Carlyle Hotel for afternoon tea, freshly brewed and served on English china, but we have not been able to conjure up any green lawn and garden there.

Bill sits down at the piano. I'm in our treasured rocking chair, wearing light-blue chambray jeans, a white tennis shirt, and sandals. I feel no need to dress up. Whatever I wear, I always feel his approval. I'm relaxed and comfortable, and I'm happy just looking at him. At this moment, everything in our room here feels right....

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375501193
ISBN 13 
9780375501197
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

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