Barfoot, Joan

(I feel nothing of that person now. But from the pictures, I can say that I was not unhappy then. I was relatively comfortable and, I thought, a success at what I had set out to do, which was to raise my family and attempt to have a happy marriage. But all that was in one compartment, an objective one, and in another, where I could not reach it, a vague uneasiness was growing. How could I have guessed then what it meant? How could I have changed what happened?)

Here’s the question I couldn’t shake as I read Joan Barfoot’s Abra, reissued by Faber with its other title Gaining Ground: is it a period piece? By which I mean, does it seem dated? It was originally published in 1978 and it felt very 1970s to me. It’s not that I didn’t like it: I really did, I think it’s a very good novel. But the Faber edition includes a blurb comparing it to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall–which, though an older novel, originally published in 1963, read to me like something outside of time, as if it could have been written decades earlier or just this year.

Gaining Ground is a story about escape. Abra is happily but stultifyingly married. She has a nice husband, Stephen, who tries to understand her; she has two children she loves. Still, something is wrong. She is (for want of a better word) unfulfilled. She is disconnected. This life does not feel to her like her real life. “Something’s wrong, obviously,” poor clueless Stephen says; “I can help, I want to help, but you never tell me what it is. Can’t you trust me to try?” She shakes her head:

my mind gone into the fog without words, no explanations, no reasonings, not even the surface ones; because they were not real. I could say it was boredom, but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t really all this time I had. What could it mean to Stephen to say that there was something happening far down where I couldn’t reach, hadn’t reached yet, that was simply wrong? It was the bald statement of something out of joint, but I couldn’t explain what it meant.

Doesn’t this sound like something straight out of The Feminine Mystique? Not that there’s anything wrong with that! And Barfoot evokes Abra’s dissociation from her own situation very powerfully, so that it does seem unbearable:

And so I drifted through the void, wanting out. I was paralyzed, could not reach out a finger, much less leap the gap of belief. And the fog closed in, closed in, over weeks, months, until I could barely see, could make out only shapes, of my children, my husband, the cashier at the supermarket, the people on the streets. I smiled and smiled and made words, but I could not even see myself, through the fog.

Then on impulse Abra goes to see a rural property for sale and finds herself “feeling that this was home.” With the help of a small legacy she has kept in her name (straight out of A Room of One’s Own) she buys it, concealing the withdrawal and the transactions and the location and everything else from her husband, and then without warning, leaving only a note, she leaves her old life behind and starts a new one there, in a rustic cabin by the woods.

The scene of her actual departure is perhaps the most startling in the novel. It’s just so absolute, so unsentimental. She has already put her family into the past–“there was no feeling whatever left,” she says, and when she drives away, she doesn’t look back, “not even a glance through the rear-view mirror.” That it isn’t difficult at all for her to do this made Abra seem to me less like a character and more like a device: surely she would, realistically, be torn, even sorrowful, however determined. She seems set up to dramatize a theoretical or political idea: that motherhood is in some sense arbitrary, that care for the self can be reason enough to reject other obligations, that true freedom and autonomy exist only outside the family, something like that. Her need for what the cabin offers her is so profound and fundamental that nothing else matters.

What she find there is a different rhythm, a way of life that–once she settles into it–feels natural. Again Barfoot’s writing is really evocative:

Once I took some left-over garden seeds into the woods and sprinkled them near me, and then sat down to see what would happen. I sat very still for a long time and slowly, very gradually and tentatively, two squirrels approached, shying, chasing each other away, but almost imperceptibly coming closer each time, and I sat rock-still until finally they nibbled at the seeds, and I wanted to reach down and stroke them, incredible flurried tails they had, wide and grey and proud, and fat bellies too, stuffing themselves, greedy animals, but it is dangerous to try to touch a squirrel, they are nervous and sensitive and will attack; and besides I did not want to affect or change the life here; I wanted just to be part of it, have it accept me. It was necessary to put away fancy human urges to capture or control, or just to make some kind of difference, to be noticed; it was necessary to be an animal.

And she does, she thinks, become an animal, “which is a fine thing.” The gift, or the goal, of this experience seems to be an enviable loss of self-consciousness: at the cabin, she lives without mirrors or clocks “Now I prove my existence by what I do.”

Is it just my own lack of kinship with this desire to get ‘back to nature,’ to lose oneself in the earth and the plants and the trees and become an animal that makes this feel, again, too metaphorical to be wholly engrossing? What kind of a choice is this, really? Her decision to leave her “fancy human” life is an exercise of agency, but in other respects it feels like a retreat.

Barfoot does raise the possibility that it isn’t ultimately a sustainable choice by bringing Abra’s daughter Kate back into her life, which Abra initially finds “an unaccustomed exhaustion, a tiring intrusion.” Her initial reaction to Kate’s appearance is almost absurd: “She has taken it all personally, and it wasn’t personal at all.” “It was just me,” she ventures as an explanation, which understandably infuriates Kate. Kate’s presence does eventually soften Abra, drawing her back into the web of human connections until she has a new decision to make.

I get that my discomfort with Abra’s original decision is somewhat beside the point. Gaining Ground is surely not offered up as a straight ‘realist’ novel any more than The Wall is, or at least not just as that; it is a fantasy born out of second wave feminism, dramatizing the cost to women’s identity of a whole system that erases or disregards their selfhood, that dismisses or frustrates their attempts to live the lives they want on their own terms, and playing out a decisive rejection of all of that. Oddly, though, to me it felt more artificial than The Wall precisely because it has the guise of realism, whereas with The Wall we are immediately cast out of the prosaically believable by the wall itself. Gaining Ground reads like a feminist statement piece, while The Wall felt more existential than political.

I have more or less answered my opening question: yes, to me Gaining Ground did seem dated, a period piece, which is not in itself a criticism. It’s a pretty powerful book. It clearly made me think–I am still puzzling over it, actually, and over my response to it so far. I wish my book club had taken me up on the suggestion that we read it together, as I would have liked to talk it over with the rest of the group.

Ruth sighs. It takes a great deal of energy, week after week, pressing her one remaining desire. “Try thinking of doneness as an awful illness then, and bound to be terminal. If you can’t even imagine feeling finished, you must think it’s a pretty terrible state to be in. So it’s about accepting what a person—me—regards as the end of the line. My definition of a fatal disease, which isn’t necessarily yours.”

A cautionary note about the rest of this post. Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines is about someone planning to end their life. That is a tough topic for most people, I expect; it is certainly a tough one for me, and the novel brought up a lot of painful thoughts about Owen’s death in ways that I talk a bit about here. If you find discussions of suicide distressing, you should probably not read on. Canada now has a Suicide crisis helpline: call 9-8-8 if you need support. The same number also works in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Exit Lines is a brisk, smart, darkly comic novel about four people who move into a retirement community named—in typically euphemistic style for such places—the Idyll Inn. When the novel opens, our protagonists are creeping through the residence’s darkened corridors at 3 am. on a secret mission, the full details—and the outcome—of which we only gradually discover. In the meantime, Barfoot deftly recounts the story of their settling in and making what accommodations they can to their new circumstances—including the loss of autonomy and privacy, the depressingly bland dietary options, the relentless parade of activities that, though well-intentioned, inevitably come across as infantilizing, and the knowledge that the Idyll Inn will be the last place any of them call home.

The novel cuts back and forth between chapters taking us, bit by bit, further down those scary hallways (“Three busy hearts leap and bang. Legs are wobbly, hands a bit shaky, flesh feels fragile. These pajamas, nightgowns, slippers and robes are warm, but the skin beneath is unfairly goosebumpy, shivery”) and chapters that tell us more about Sylvia, Greta, George, and Ruth—including what their lives and families were like before they ended up at the Idyll Inn. They were not all strangers to each other before, but the bond they form at the Inn is a pleasantly bracing surprise. It is particularly important to Ruth, who has determined to control her eventual exit from the Idyll Inn by ending her own life, on her own timeline and in the way that she has figured out will be quickest, least painful, and easiest for those assisting her to cover up. In her new friends she finds (she hopes) allies and co-conspirators, though she waits until she is fairly sure of their loyalty before asking for what she admits is an “enormous” favour, “to be with me come the time. And . . . to help me.”

Ruth’s request understandably shocks the other three:

Friendship is supposed to be companionability, compatibility, trust, empathy, challenge, warmth, goodwill, consolation, and sustenance. Not this. What she’s asking has to be—or is not?—beyond all possible bounds.

What follows is a lot of arguing and and soul searching as each of the characters confronts questions from the pragmatic to the profound:

What do they believe? What are their values, and if any, their faiths? How do these apply to the small figure of Ruth sitting here?

What is compassion, how important is trust? . . .

What exactly is so exceptional about human beings? A single human being? Besides the fact that only human beings can even contemplate such a question.

The single most important question is “Who gets to decide?” Ruth says she does, but Ruth’s friends aren’t so sure, or at least (especially if they are going to help her) they need a better reason than because it’s what she wants (“What Ruth wants: ‘My time, my place, my way'”). “I’m sure I’d have an easier time,” Sylvia finally says, “if you had an awful illness that was going to be fatal.” Ruth’s reasons are not as straightforward as that, and perhaps they are not as good as that—but whose business is that but hers?

barfoot2 The others’ counterarguments are also not that robust. “God crops up,” but none of them is religious, or at least doctrinally secure, enough to insist that her plan is wrong or sinful. They are all in varying stages of physical decline, and the one certainty they share is that they will eventually leave the Idyll Inn the same way other residents have, their bodies whisked away as quickly and quietly as possible so as not to discourage the rest. Still, it’s one thing to die and another to kill yourself, or so they try to convince Ruth (“Those people who struggle to be alive. When we are safe and comfortable here—they feel their lives are precious even when they are so very difficult, but you do not feel your life is?” challenges Greta). Ruth is resolute, however, and finally, one by one, they come around. As Sylvia puts it after her own change of heart, “Whatever anyone says—lawyers, doctors, governments, religions, all those nincompoop moral busybodies that float around like weed seeds—we should be in charge of our own selves.”

It sounds so simple, even inarguable, put like that, but the long journey our characters take to get there reminds us that it isn’t, as does the lived experience of anyone with direct experience of suicide. Details matter, of course. What Ruth is seeking is closest to what here in Canada we have termed “MAiD,” medical assistance in dying, although the help she asks for isn’t strictly speaking medical—but that is precisely because she does not have the kind of “awful illness” Sylvia initially thinks would be the only justification for death on her own terms. Sylvia is thinking of a physical illness, and that generally seems to be the easiest scenario for people to accept. The availability of MAiD to those with illnesses other people can’t so easily see for themselves, specifically mental illnesses, is more controversial. I’ve had several painfully searching conversations about this issue since Owen died: I am fortunate to have people in my life who are deeply thoughtful as well as remarkably kind, and I have been truly grateful to be able to talk with them about what having this option might have meant to Owen, as well as how I expect I would have felt about it as his mother. If I have reached any conclusions, they rest, as Sylvia’s does, on the primacy of autonomy as a right and a value. But there is nothing simple about any of it—the hypotheticals are as terrible for me to contemplate as the reality, if in different ways.

phillips Barfoot simplifies things for her characters by emphasizing Ruth’s clarity of mind and purpose: whether you find her desire to die more or less acceptable as a result is going to depend on your values, but it does, I think, help answer the question “who decides” in her favour. Illnesses like depression affect, perhaps distort, people’s perception of reality: it is harder to defer to their autonomy, then, although perhaps it shouldn’t be, as what makes the most difference to someone’s quality of life is how they experience the world, how they experience life, not what other people insist it is actually like. Of course, we want to believe things will change for them, that they will get better, and most depressed people will. What does that mean about their right to say, as Ruth does, “my time, my place, my way,” or our right to intervene? One of the most insightful discussions I’ve heard about suicide since Owen’s death is an interview Hermione Lee did with Adam Phillips about his book On Giving Up. Phillips argues that we should be “able to acknowledge, not happily, that for some people, their lives are actually unbearable,” that the dogmatic insistence on life as the ultimate unassailable intrinsic good (what he calls “the ‘life is sacred’ line”) “means you are absolutely compelled to suffer whatever it is that’s inflicted on you,” which he rejects as an “intolerable position.” I agree, while recognizing as he does that this does not make any part of such a scenario anything other than heartbreaking, tragic. Phillips notes that the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott never tried to dissuade anyone from suicide: “I just try to make sure they do it for the right reasons,” Winnicott said. I find that a defensible and principled position—but this is a case in which my head and my heart are in profound and perhaps intractable conflict.*

Is Ruth seeking death for the “right reasons”? I think Exit Lines ultimately answers this question in the negative, although I won’t go into spoilers about what exactly happens. I found the novel’s ending disappointing in some ways, because it seemed to falter from its own hard won and, to my mind, justifiable position. On the other hand, Barfoot’s characters do find comfort in the choice Ruth has fought for, in knowing that they do not have to “be helpless,” that “this could be a strong thing, although [they] did not dream of it before.” They feel better knowing that they do not have to drift passively into that good night but can stay in control, so that each day is really their own unless or until they choose otherwise. Planning for this eventuality gives them a long-term project “more riveting than playing bridge, watching TV or turning needles and wool, click, click click.” The tone of the ending, which is uplifting without being saccharine, is well suited to the book as a whole, which I have probably made sound much heavier going than it actually is. I began by describing it as “darkly comic” and it really is quite funny, and exceptionally clear-eyed about people’s weaknesses and hypocrisies and moral compromises. I really appreciated Barfoot’s ability to combine a brisk, entertaining story with such important questions about life and death. The book I read right after it, Elizabeth Berg’s Never Change, tries to do something similar—it is about someone with terminal cancer making decisions about the end of his life—but by comparison it seemed pat, simplistic, and emotionally manipulative. barfoot3

It was Backlisted that made me go looking for something by Barfoot to read: their conversation about her earlier novel Gaining Ground (aka Abra) was completely convincing about the quality of the novel. Exit Lines is the only one of Barfoot’s novels held at the Halifax Public Libraries, which is why I got to it first, but it turns out the Dalhousie library has a lot of them, several of which I checked out on my last visit to the stacks. I don’t know why I hadn’t already read more of Barfoot’s fiction: I had certainly heard of her, and I think I actually read Dancing in the Dark many years ago, but somehow I had never gotten any further. I plan to make up for that in the next few weeks.

*I am not interested in debating the ethics of suicide here, or in defending either Owen’s choice or our understanding of it. I was recently reminded that this is a subject on which some people feel free to judge and criticize both the person who died and those who grieve them. Comments along those lines will be deleted.