Thoreau audible in memoirs of 2 writers> Grumbach looks at 80; Henderson builds tower

THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY, by Doris Grumbach, Beacon Press, Boston, 2000, 128 pages, $22.

TOWER: FAITH, VERTIGO AND AMATEUR CONSTRUCTION, by Bill Henderson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 215 pages, $22.

Pleasure has not been a burning theme in Doris Grumbach’s last five memoirs. She has written about Maine, religion, aging, aching and nearly all the angles of her literary life. She’s not a downer. Nor is she dour. But you wouldn’t exactly call her approach upbeat.

Grumbach is pensive — and in a peculiarly American voice. One hears echoes of Henry David Thoreau or May Sarton in the straightforward journalism of Grumbach’s prose. Yet she is more grounded than Thoreau and less posturing than Sarton.

In “The Pleasure of Their Company,” her newest book, Grumbach recounts preparations for her 80th birthday celebration to which she has invited friends and family who have made up her rich and accomplished life. She’s not the type of person who typically has large parties, especially for herself. But this is a significant anniversary, and even someone of her reserve can’t help whirling in a windfall of preparations, frustrations and personal history.

Grumbach has a guest list, but, when you’re 80, there are also absences, the names of beloved friends who have passed away. Instead of slipping into messy bitterness or somber mourning, Grumbach stays on the level of tribute, inviting these old friends to attend the party in spirit. Her own faith, which weaves its way into many of her thoughts, gives no answers about the wake of life behind her or the cycle of age. Instead, her commitment to be a believer does what only real faith can do. It offers anchorage.

This is not new territory for Grumbach. It’s more of an extension of territory she has already covered but hasn’t finished exploring. Her “entry” style — a collection of anecdotes, meanderings, eurekas, descriptions, criticisms and explications — rolls along like a series of phone calls from a neighbor who is somehow reclusive and chatty at the same time.

Grumbach’s memoirs have all been wry, self-effacing and scholarly, and this one is, too. Her neighbors, her four daughters, and the looming figures of Malcolm Cowley, George Sand, Samuel Beckett, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Thomas Merton, Marcel Proust and Virigina Woolf step in and out of her mind’s arena. Anyone who has read the earlier memoirs expects such characters to show up in her work.

But Grumbach has never written with as much tenderness and appreciation for her former husband and for her longtime partner, Sybil. In a moment of crisis, Grumbach counts her blessings:

“There was Sybil to celebrate. We had been together for twenty-five years, a union that once was regarded as scandaleux but, in the current climate for such odd couples, seemed to be accepted by most persons. I have always regarded the homosexual life as an extension of, not a change from, heterosexuality. I did not `come out’ violently, I moved on, from a happy thirty years with a husband I loved and with whom I led a most satisfying sexual life, to a new mode, a new experience, a new love, that now has lasted almost as long as my marriage.”

This is surely one of the most graceful and openhearted testimonies of love and friendship.

On a lighter note, Grumbach introduces a new pet, a tabby cat she dubs Kitty Kelley after the noted biographer. Grumbach swears off the cat as a writing topic, but can’t finally resist, and her observations expose a vulnerable, gamesome side to her.

While Grumbach is most interested in exploring an inner sense of the passage of time and saves most of her musings for lines such as “O death, where is thy sting?” she also shows a contrarian’s sense of humor. When a newsletter arrives from Swarthmore College, Grumbach pokes fun at the alumni entries by imagining a fictional submission from a bankrupt woman with three failed marriages, arthritic knees, a son who killed himself after being kicked out of Harvard for drug dealing, and seasonal work which helps her maintain a trailer in the Maine woods. Grumbach ends this playful — not to mention incisive — ditty with: “I regret not being able to contribute to the Alumni Collection, but I wish you success with the drive.”

The quiet triumph of this book is the balance Grumbach strikes between the universal and the personal, the painful and the transcendent. Not everyone will be drawn to the worries, prayers, memories and complaints of Grumbach’s daily life. But her portrait of a writer at 80 — willing to engage with the past and present — is, ultimately, a declaration of love.

One of the many real-life characters to show up in Grumbach’s book is Bill Henderson, a Deer Isle summer resident whose new book “Tower: Faith, Vertigo and Amateur Construction” also falls into the memoirist camp. With distant desires to be heir apparent to Thoreau’s Walden Pond experiment, Henderson buys a plot of land in Sedgwick and sets out adventurously to construct a tower on it.

While Thoreau is his guide when it comes to meager economics and the imperative to “simplify,” Henderson uncovers a collection of tower dwellers, among them William Butler Yeats, Carl Jung and the American poet Robinson Jeffers. He looks back to the biblical structures built toward heaven and into the engineering of contemporary and ancient art pieces. His own structure is built with an approach he calls “intuitive engineering,” and it engages his mind and heart with winsome determination.

After dispensing with the much-anticipated phallic jokes, Henderson gets down to the business of explaining his own quest for meaning. He reveals a past of heavy drinking, uninhibited sexing and generally loud living. He refers to Pushcart Press, the bellwether of American letters and annual anthology of American literature he founded in the 1970s. He speaks lovingly of his wife, his young daughter, his earlier books and of a family life in East Hampton, N.Y.

It is, however, after attending Sunday services with Grumbach that Henderson realizes he wants to build “a tower for no reason.” (Grumbach, by the way, plainly recounts the same moment in “The Pleasure of Their Company.”) Six years ago, Grumbach had been a muse of sorts to Henderson, who founded a group of professed Luddites called The Lead Pencil Club after reading her laments about electronics in the memoir “Extra Innings.”

So it’s no wonder he looks to her now for a moment of clarity. She and Sybil don’t say much, but Henderson is off and running. He’s in search of himself, his life, his God.

While his story can be funny (the warmth of his daughter’s love) and sad (the chills in his marriage), it can also slip into the glib and nostalgic realms of self-absorbed writing. You may weary of the midlife crisis displayed in the nuts and bolts of Henderson’s life. You may find him hasty in his estimations of Maine life.

But mostly you’ll be able to walk casually on this woodsy guy quest for height. Small is good, Henderson says. That also applies to this book, which is a quick read of tall measures taken of one man’s life.