Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 — Fog claims as its source the diary kept from 1968 to 1972 by Cora E. Lacy, a woman in her late eighties, living in a small town in Illinois. In the introductory “A Note,” Ms. Scanlan describes finding the diary in the garbage-bound left-overs of a yard sale. The work first attracted her as a physical object: a stained and time-battered book. Eventually, its contents pulled her in.
As she read the diary, Ms. Scanlan says, “I typed out sentences that caught my attention. Then, for ten years, I played with the sentences I’d pulled. I edited, arranged and rearranged them into the composition you find here.”
The overall arrangement of Aug 9 — Fog takes off from the design of the original diary, in which each page includes all five years of a specific day and month, rather like a gardener’s notebook; for example, one page has blank spaces for May 31, 1968, May 31, 1969, and so on. Fog’s entries are undated. Sectioned by season, starting and ending with “Winter,” they condense five years into five consecutive seasons.
Each entry in Aug 9—Fog makes a sparse page with rarely more than a brief paragraph of fragmented sentences. (The hashmarks in the following extract indicate page ends.)
Happy New Year. Brr. Brr. Brr. Alvira a cold. Harold sleep. Few snow flakes in eve. Emma didn’t get home.
#
Clear nice winter day not doing much today. Little squirrel came this A.M. and he sure likes cornbread. Had letter from Bertha she better and contented out there.
#
I painting. Clouding at noon.
#
Looking at old books of the church that Martha gave us & pictures, alone all day. Clarence over to see Bayard — he living in the past, other wise he pretty good.
#
I fixing dark striped dress of Maude’s. Maude ate good breakfast, oatmeal, poached eggs, little sausage. Maude ate her dinner pretty good. A letter from Lloyd saying John died the 16th.
Tipping between speculations on Ms. Scanlan’s process (including building our trust that her work is not a literary hoax, but really is based on a found diary) and immersion in Mrs. Lacy’s life makes reading Fog fascinating and pleasurable. How did Ms. Scanlan choose what to leave in and what to cut out? A man’s death gets no more coverage than the repair of a striped dress, and even less than a “good breakfast.” This could lead us to believe that Mrs. Lacy knew one of life’s great secrets: while death is epic if it’s of someone close to you, or your own, every death is no less quotidian than “oatmeal, poached eggs, little sausage.” The book’s events do have a dramatic build; did Ms. Scanlan start with “Winter” in order to create that build? And did the climax “actually” occur in, say, 1969 or 1972?
[Left: Kathryn Scanlan, photographed by Melanie Schiff]
Other decisions provoke more practical questions. It takes a while to figure out: who is Alvira? Maude? Emma? Misty’s a pet, right? A cat or a dog? (Did I miss a clue?) Of the many people who visit and are visited, which are Mrs. Lacy’s children? Which, grandchildren? Siblings or friends? Which live with her, which live far away, which are neighbors?
To define the names, of course, would be intrusive, “unrealistic”; the diarist herself found no need to explain. Ms. Scanlan introduces only Mrs. Lacy herself in “A Note.” The other people mentioned remain without background, their only context the entries themselves. Paradoxically, in such decisions and the demands they make on the reader, Ms. Scanlan’s literary presence makes itself felt. At times I resented reading Mrs. Lacy’s diary through Ms. Scanlan’s deceptively simple, actually intricate, moucharabieh screen. I had a naive urge to get to the “real” Mrs. Lacy. In any case, time’s damage to the diary meant Ms. Scanlan herself didn’t have full access to the original contents.
The entries’ vigor present Mrs. Lacy as much younger than she was, maybe because of Ms. Scanlan’s choices, maybe because it’s the way she was, maybe because of my own preconceptions or experiences about the tone of old age.
Mrs. Lacy was a contemporary of my great-grandmothers, one of whom came from the U.S. Midwest. I believe I live right at the edge of living memory, touching the kind of life Mrs. Lacy lived: her close-in circle of family and neighbors, attention to the weather, occupation with domestic duties and crafts, and in particular a gentle and stoic acceptance of life and death.
I wondered, as I read, how someone decades younger than I am (as Ms. Scanlan herself seems to be) would understand or be able to envision what Mrs. Lacy recorded. How would a young or old man relate? Would a man relate at all — and if he did, would he feel her as something of himself or would she reflect a woman he’s known?
Some entries puzzled me, maybe due to regional quirks and, again, the generational difference:
Fire whistle in nite. Steady rain at 8. He brought us some mush to fry.
What’s a fire whistle — is it the same as a siren? Why would someone deliver mush to someone else? (I guessed the wife of “he” made a huge batch and sent her husband out share it. But I could be totally off.)
Commonplace details illuminate:
D. took cactus to basement.
If you know that certain kinds of potted cactuses need a period of coolness and darkness to flower, you understand that the action wasn’t a mildly odd plant rearrangement, but purposeful, future-looking. You know that Mrs. Lacy and “D.” — her daughter — took care of each other in more than merely mundane ways.
Over to Maude G. little bit. Took my cactus for her to see the bloom, very pretty dark purple. D. took pictures of it.
They suffice, Ms. Scanlan’s selections, to build a world. Writers no longer need elaborate physical descriptions to set a scene; film, still and moving, put an end to that. Although only real life experience can form that most evocative memory, fragrance, we need never have been in a 1970’s living room to know how it looks and sounds. The accretion of images offered by media can assemble a convincing, if only audio-visual, setting. I pictured Mrs. Lacy’s surroundings down to the afghans crocheted of colorful acrylic yarn, the Americana furniture, the Christmas cactus on the windowsill. (Yet for all I know, the furniture could have been Danish modern, with Pendleton blankets as throws.)
Whatever images a reader creates from details implied but never stated in Aug 9 — Fog, the feeling of the woman’s life touches its pages. Not a generic “old woman” life, yet somehow universal.
Fire whistle in nite. Steady rain at 8. He brought us some mush to fry.
She lies awake in bed, listening to a fire alert out there in the darkness; she wonders if it’s someone’s house and how bad it will be. Rain opens the day. A man, of some friendly relation, brings a gift of food.
Kathryn Scanlan identifies herself not just as a reader and arranger of the diary, but as a poet doppelgänger to the diarist. “I don’t picture her. I am her.” Yet her life surely diverges greatly from that of Cory E. Lacy. She’s generations younger. She’s not someone who would spell night “nite,” though in a writer’s synesthesia, conflating spoken words with words seen as letters, she writes in “A Note,” “Often I say to myself — ‘some hot nite .’”
Folk prose, found not as carefully wrought dialect in published works, but in original letters and diaries, draws many a well-schooled writer and reader, in the same manner that “primitive” and “visionary” artworks fascinate visual artists and connoisseurs. Folk expression is perceived as possessing a directness, an unselfconscious authenticity envied by literary forms such as “auto-fiction” and “confessional.” Its natural cadences and often odd-seeming forms and idioms please the ear and the imagination. In a 1975 New Yorker essay, Hannah Arendt observed of W.H. Auden that “much of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of idioms of everyday language … Where such fluency is achieved, we are magically convinced that everyday speech is latently poetic, and, taught by the poets, our ears open up to the true mysteries of language.”
The written-ness of a diary does diverge from “everyday speech”; diary writers fall somewhere between the spontaneity of conversation and the more careful self-presentation of writing. Since Mrs. Lacy’s diary was a late-life gift from her daughter and son-in-law, she likely did not keep it as a secret or private document, but rather assumed it would be read by someone else some day; she may even have invited certain others to read it. If she had secrets, she kept them from the diary, or Ms. Scanlan kept them from us.
However artfully chosen and ordered its pieces are, Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 — Fog is no more a revelation of a specific private life than a handful of pottery shards is a revelation of a lost village. It comprises fragments of a woman’s life that another woman constructed into a literary work. Its contrivance makes it no less “authentic.” If we can’t trust artists to show us truth, then we might as well ditch any hope of sharing ourselves across the borders of our skins, over distance and time.
Cora E. Lacy reached out to a reader — not specifically me or you or a young woman perusing a yard sale, but some reader — by quietly setting down what pieces of her days and nights she found reason to put in writing. Kathryn Scanlan reciprocated, and we have Aug 9 — Fog.
[Published June 4, 2019 by MCD/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 128 pages, $18.00 small format hardcover]