Does Hope Have Feathers?
Max Porter's debut novel, "Grief Is the Thing With Feathers", on its 10th anniversary.
1.
Once upon a time, there was a myth. This myth may have been the first of its kind, or maybe it’s always existed, in a perpetual state of transformation. It began (if it began at all) like this:
A thing is what it is, until it becomes what it was not.
This story became:
A blind visionary upset a goddess who changed him into a woman. Seven years later, she became he again, because change is constant.
The story also became:
There was a beautiful man that a nymph wished to be united with forever. As a result, they were fused into one body, because obsession is all-consuming.
Another version has a young woman pursued by lust, begging the gods, “Give me aid!” Her arms grow downy feathers, and she soars into the air as a crow. The girl who can fly is now free. “Hope,” we are told by a later poet, “is the thing with feathers.” An even later writer transmutes “Hope” in the title of a book to “Grief”.
Change is at the centre of these stories and in the fabric of their structures. It’s in the nature of being human. Metamorphosis is at the heart of all that matters to us. In Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, change is Crow.
2.
The story goes something like this: Dad (no first names here; we’re in the realm of the symbolic) is a Ted Hughes scholar whose wife suddenly dies. This “greatest tragedy of [his] life” occurs just as he is obsessing over Hughes’ collection of mythologies about the character Crow. He’s left to raise two sons alone, known collectively here as Boys. One night, Crow steals into their home to transform the cracked-with-a-piece-missing frieze of the lives of Dad and his Boys.
Crow is many things. He is Grief and he is Hope; he is multiple figures from many mythologies; he is the horned hunter haunting Berkshire and Windsor, and the faithful bodyguard to St Vincent’s dead body; he is the “central bird ... at every extreme” that Ted Hughes refers to in an interview with Paris Review; he is “a template ... A myth to be slipped in”. Crow is as large as Whitman and contains as many multitudes. He is all things to all men, that he might by all means help this family through their shared tragedy.
Here we see Dad, the scholar steeped in his subject, scouring the words of Ted Hughes and picking apart the lines of his compositions for whatever truth they contain. Here again we see Dad, sketching Mum “unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones”. He has opened her up as if to expose the secret of life, of death.
Here we see Crow, much like the academic poring over every integrant of the whole, literally picking Dad’s teeth clean and scraping his bones, feeding off every scrap of effluvia and detritus from his body. “I prised open his mouth,” Crow reveals, “and counted bones, snacked a little on his unbrushed teeth ...”
Here we see me, much like Crow and Dad, scrubbing every word of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers as if they are diamonds of meaning encrusted with the everyday dirt of language, sifting through the many mythological and literary references like panning for gold.
3.
Hyperbole is the lingua franca of the obsessed person. He will die without his love; she worships the artist’s work; he will not eat, will not sleep, until he’s achieved his goal. This tendency towards hyperbole accounts for the commonplace expression, “I’m obsessed with [insert latest trend here].” Loathe as I am to join linguistic fads, I’m forced to borrow this one for the relationship I once had with Grief Is the Thing With Feathers: I was obsessed with it.
Obsession is an urgent need to understand a thing — understood to such an extent that it can be inhabited. Like the nymph who longs to be with the young god and ends up fused with his body, the distinctions between the obsession and the obsessed melt away, just as Dad concedes that “there was very little division between my imaginary and real worlds”.
Obsession is often an empty promise. The reader is determined to read until total understanding is achieved, until the book opens up its ultimate secrets so that it may be closed once and for all. The scholar will not rest until he writes the final line on his subject, concludes his conclusive interpretation of the work. The widower will grieve until the intensity of his feeling gives life to death.
Obsession is like grief in the home of Dad and the Boys: it gets everywhere. “The whole place was heavy mourning,” Crow says, “every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief.” It consumes everything.
When Crow first bursts into the mausoleum of mourning that is the dead Mum’s house, Dad is trapped in his grief and wonders whether this is his life from now on — an unchanging role as foreman to the factory line of days muddled through, a “list-making trader in clichés of gratitude, machine-like architect of routines for small children with no Mum”. He is stagnating within the sempiternity of his obsessive suffering.
Crow offers a reprieve from sadness: he gives Dad “something to think about”, which provides “a little break in the mourning”, distracting him from his obsession. But the reprieve Crow offers is more than a mere pause; it’s a fracture in the otherwise unending continuity of stasis, a blip in the flatline of obsession, the change in note that turns a sustained sound into melody. Dad begins to be free of an obsession that’s become noise rather than music.
4.
My early readings of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers — and the attendant late-night book-and-bitch with friends over scotch and the mid-shift debates at the bookshop where I worked — all focused on a specific, narrow, (I’ll admit it) stupidinterpretation of Crow as only representing grief. This straitjacket answer came out of an equally restrictive desire to “work out” what each thing in this book meant, as if it were a code to be cracked.
My exploration of the book stagnated as I wandered circles around the same interpretive geography. But change came and, like Crow, moved me on from where I was floundering. Obsession can only take the passenger so far; eventually, it runs out of gas, coasts to a stop, and the only option is to step out of the vehicle. Time for change, time for Crow.
When I read Grief Is the Thing With Feathers after the death of someone without whom the world makes less sense, the novel’s final transformations — of innocent Boys into knowing Boys, of Dad from hopeless to hopeful — had much more power than they had on previous readings. The book transformed my lonely confusion at a world in which I was supposed to continue living after this loved one had left. It helped me understand that, of course, someone has to leave first, and whoever remains does so with everyone else who has not left yet.
When I read Grief Is the Thing With Feathers after my wife lost a loved one, it helped me become Crow. We who accompany the bereaved through their grief must change to accommodate their changing needs. We are protectors, guides, jesters, life lines to cling to, and shoulders to sob on. I offered my wife the sort of disdainful irony that makes her laugh, the kind Crow shoots at Dad when he’s waxing lyrical about the enormity of his grief:
“Eugh, said Crow, you sound like a fridge magnet.”
5.
When we fall in love, we pine, yearn, lust after, pursue — we obsess. Obsession like this is also how we begin other massive, life-defining projects. We become interested in an issue, it won’t leave us alone, and we pursue the achievement of our goal (the solution to the problem, the vaccine for the sickness, the novel that needs to be written) like a lover in the throes of early passion.
But try maintaining the intensity of young love over the course of a long-term relationship. Either it burns out or it burns you out. Attempt to continue writing a book or painting a landscape or designing that building to perfection, if you insist — perfection never arrives. Paul Valéry, who knew about the enthusiasm of the artist, wrote in 1933:
“In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed ... but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it.”1
Constant change is instability. Singular obsession is stasis. Transition, then, might be something like finding a sense of balance. In the end, this is what Dad discovers in his relationship with Crow:
“Perhaps if Crow had taught him anything it was a constant balancing.”
Perhaps if Grief Is the Thing With Feathers has taught me anything (it has, many things, here is just one of them) it is this balancing between devotion and adaptation. Life is not fully lived without both.
La Nouvelle Revue Français, “Au sujet du Cimetière marin”, Paul Valéry (1933)