Mark
Helprin (2012)
PS3558.E4775 I5 2012
Of course, I’ll read it again – if only to luxuriate
in his use of language and to feel the pull of the story. The feeling of re-reading
was no different than after the first reading one of the great novels of the 20th
century, his A Soldier of the Great War (PS3558.E4775 S65 1996).
In First Russian Summer, a short story
in the collection entitled, A Dove of the East: And Other Stories
(PS3558.E4775 D68 1990), so acute are an old man’s memories of his grandfather
and the vast forests of central Russia that a reader has the rare privilege of
creating a vivid and intense memory that is somehow shared with the narrator.
How old must author Mark Helprin be to have lived through those years in
czarist Russia before the revolution? An author’s sleight of hand? Helprin has
the rare gift of being able to evoke a time and place as if he lived in that
era, so finely tuned is he to the nuance, rhythm, sights, sounds, smells and
particulars of daily life in those years.
Helprin is on home turf In Sunlight and in Shadow
as the story centers around New York City (as it was known then rather than the
shorthand New York, New York) just after the end of the Second World War, though
in the story we visit many times and places around the world from Tunisia, to
the Ardennes (in an extraordinary chapter), London, California (both San
Francisco and the Central Valley) as well as many other stops, times and places
along the way – all of which, as described, feel
as if we are experiencing them contemporaneously. To read Helprin is always a
bit unsettling as his writings lead readers to self-examination as their
thoughts and feelings are tested even as the novel unfolds.
In Citizen Kane, Mr. Bernstein (Kane’s
factotum) shares a memory of crossing over to New Jersey on a ferry and seeing,
on a departing ferry, a girl in a white dress carrying a white parasol…”I
only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month
hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.” In Sunlight and in Shadow
Harry Copeland doesn’t let the woman he sees on the ferry become a memory, so
moved by her that he rearranges his day to ensure that he’ll not only see her
again but will also meet her. One of the many pleasures of In Sunlight are the
coincidences of contact and close proximity because unbeknownst to Harry and
Catherine (the woman on the ferry) they had seen each other earlier as
children. They do meet again and they
fall in love.
Helprin’s latest novel owes much
to both A Soldier of the Great War and a Winter’s Tale (PS3558.E4775
W5 1995) for the sweep and accuracy of history and the stories of great
romantic love. But, the promise implicit in the short chapter in a Winter’s
Tale entitled, Nothing is Random is the promise kept
In
Sunlight and in Shadow and, at the risk of a long quotation from that
short chapter bears repeating:
“…time was invented because we
cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have
been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can
be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough
to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever
was is; everything that ever will be is - and so on, in all possible
combinations. Though in perceiving it we image that it is in motion, and
unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end,
or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately
and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are
apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to
life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness
continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as
to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but
something that is."
That Helprin believes this is so
is what powers In Sunlight and in Shadow. Once we return from the New York
City of 1947 and the lives of the people touched in the book we are changed as
all great novelists change their readers…and we know that “…all rivers run full
to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are
redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun
and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible…”
