Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

most twenty miles per hour (the speed limit in there was twelve, I think). It was as though she were waving from a parade float. “I’m on my way to the store,” she said. “We need [mumble]…”
    “What’s that?”
    “BUTTAH!”
    With a bad feeling I watched her recede. Back at the cabin, Lytle was caning around on the front porch in a panic. He waved at me as I turned into the gravel patch where we parked. “She’s drunk!” he barked. “Look at this bottle, beloved. Good God, it was full this morning!”
    I tried to make him tell me what had happened, but he was too antsy. He wore pajamas, black slippers without socks, a gray tweed coat, and the fedora.
    “Oh, I’ve angered her, beloved,” he said. “I’ve angered her.”
    He gave me the story as we sped toward the gate. It was more or less as I suspected. The same argument came up every time Polly visited, though I’d never seen it escalate so. They had family in a distant town with whom she remained on decent terms, but Lytle insisted on shunning these people and thought his little sister should, as well. It had to do with an old scandal about land, duplicity involving a will. A greedy uncle had tried to take away his father’s farm. But these modern-day cousins, descendants of the rival party, they weren’t pretending, as Lytle believed, not to understand why he wouldn’t see them. I think they were genuinely confused. There’d been scenes. He’d stood in the doorway and denounced these people, in the highest rhetoric, “Seed of the usurper.” Doubtless they thought he was further gone mentally than he was, that when he uttered these curses he had in mind some carpetbagger from olden days, because the relatives just kept coming back, despite never having been allowed past the porch steps.
    Now Miss Polly had let them into the vestibule, nearly into the Court of the Muse. Lytle viewed this as the wildest betrayal. He’d been beastly toward them, when he rose from his nap, and Polly had fled. He seemed shaken to remember the things he’d said.
    “Mister Lytle, what did you say?”
    “I told the truth,” he said passionately. “I recognized the moment, that’s what I did.” But in the defensive thrust of his jaw there quivered something like embarrassment.
    He mentions this land dispute in his “family memoir,” A Wake for the Living , his most readable and in many ways his best book. That’s perhaps an idiosyncratic opinion. There are people who’ve read a lot more than I have who consider his novels lost classics. But it may be precisely because of the Faustian ego that thundered above his sense of himself as a novelist that he carried a lighter burden into the memoir, and this freedom thawed in his style some of the vivacity and spontaneity that otherwise you find only in the letters. There’s a scene in which he describes the morning his grandmother was shot in the throat by a Union soldier in 1863. “Nobody ever knew who he was or why he did it,” Lytle writes, “he mounted a horse and galloped out of town.” To the end of her long life this woman wore a velvet ribbon at her neck, fastened with a golden pin. That’s how close Lytle was to the Civil War. Close enough to reach up as a child, passing into sleep, and fondle the clasp of that pin. The eighteenth century was just another generation back from there, and so on, hand to hand. This happens, I suppose, this collapsing of time, when you make it as far as your nineties. When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.
    The incident with his grandmother is masterfully handled:
     
She ran to her nurse. The bullet had barely missed the jugular vein. Blood darkened the apple she still held in her hand, and blood was in her shoe. The enemy in the street now invaded the privacy of the house. The