This happened a few months ago, when my family, being residents of a county that was enduring a scary early spike in COVID-19 infections, began sheltering at home in the most austere way we could. I rarely stepped outside. We had everything from diapers to eggs delivered to our front stoop. The notion of going out for burgers was incomprehensible, but I learned that you could get a Shake Shack kit through Goldbelly, and this news sent ripples of joy through our household. (Apparently my teenage children had grown much wearier of my “Italian improv” cooking than I had realized.)
I should be grateful. That kit wound up teaching me about myself and the tricky nuances of cooking a proper Shake Shack-style burger. But I learned these lessons by messing up. If we’re being honest—and my kids had no problem with being bluntly so—I botched the job. Perhaps my mistakes can be your guide as we head into the Fourth of July weekend.
To this aged Michelangelo, with his frailties, his frustrations, and his insoluble contradictions, William Wallace has devoted the latest and most poignant of his books on the artist (there are six others). Because all creative people start out as young people, we have a tendency to ascribe creativity to youth itself, but mature masters like Michelangelo remind us that the urge to create has nothing to do with age or the lack of it, but rather with that inventive spirit both he and Vasari called ingegno—inborn wit, cleverness, genius. The spirit often manifests young, but like wine and wood, it depends on age to reveal its full complexity. When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of Michelangelo, God’s Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work. As dear friends died and his body weakened, he took on a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware, as Wallace emphasizes, that he would never live to see them completed. In his deeply spiritual vision of the world, his own limits hardly mattered; God had called him, and he had answered.
Griffin’s point is not to demonise working-class men, but rather to point out the ways in which the role of “bread winner” could be as oppressive to a man as it was to his dependants. Many autobiographers report a father’s drinking becoming heavier in response to overwhelming pressure – the death of a child, an industrial accident, a local downturn in trade. Griffin is also exquisitely alive to the fact that, while memoirists may find it just about acceptable to mention a father’s drinking, there are all kinds of incidents that may feel too shaming to get a public airing. Stories of a mother who leaves, or gets sent to the asylum, or has an extra baby with the lodger may simply be impossible to share, especially with the grandchildren for whom so many of these accounts were touchingly written.
For readers who can tolerate that much unresolved unreality in their fiction, “Death in Her Hands” may be just the ticket. And even if you have your doubts about the novel, it’s an odd enough enterprise to make you glad that it exists.
Outside Trinity, Edmund Burke
removes his pocket handkerchief
to rub the pigeon droppings from his brow.
Oliver Goldsmith puts down the book
he has been reading since 1864.
A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.