David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Delilah is a relentless valentine for and about the struggling class, a trump card for those holding an empty hand. Delilah offers the possibility of ordinary American female life redeemed by… by what? The sugar rush of over-the-moon sentiment. In five hours at her house one summer day, I ate pancakes and syrup for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for an afternoon pick-me-up. The hungry heart will be cured by sweetness itself. Delilah wants every call to end on an “audio hug” of empathy and recognition, and it does, it does. Inevitably she lifts us up where we belong—where the eagles fly, etc.—even as her own life remains obdurately earthbound.

In 1982, when Delilah, who is white, brought her African American husband home to meet her parents, her father “freaked out, jumped up, and ran to the gun closet, chasing me off with a shotgun.” He disowned her, and when he was dying, he refused to allow her to visit. Most of her children—three biological, nine adopted—have African American, African, or Hispanic ancestry. She’s thrice divorced.

A disproportionately high percentage of callers are raising two or three children without the father, who has left or was never there. Asked what kind of man she’s attracted to, Delilah says, “You’ve got to be quick, bright, funny—and a mass murderer. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d pick out the guy who would break my heart. Because my father was so passionate and so brilliant and so emotionally not available, that, I guess, is what I’m attracted to.” Delilah and the show are father-fixated, redressing the distant or absent or dead father by positing an all-knowing, all-loving God.

(My minirebellion against my journalist parents was to become a fiction writer—and then, later, a writer of wayward nonfiction.)

Delilah embodies the ambivalence her audience feels toward competing definitions of being female. Her voice is half tease, half hug, which is what she looks like: ex-bombshell/Mother of the Year. She wears a low-cut blouse, which emphasizes her décolletage, but she frequently pulls up her blouse and crosses her arms over her chest. She espouses self-esteem to her listeners, but she confides to her executive producer, “My legs are the only part of myself I like.” In most photos, she appears to be an all-American blonde, but she frequently reminds her listeners that her hair color comes from Kmart.

In Love Someone Today , Delilah writes, “I had romantic notions playing in my head of a midnight dance under the spectacular sky. I found him”—her last husband, when they were still married—“sleeping soundly in our bed. I tried to wake him. After several unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and walked out. I felt angry and rejected, my feelings hurt that he wouldn’t jump up and enjoy my romantic fantasy with me. I zipped up my coat and headed out to the backyard again. I stood there, frozen in the beauty of the moment, yet still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I uttered a small prayer of praise, thanking the Almighty for this wonderful scene. And then, in a voice that was so clear it was almost audible, I heard God speak to my heart. ‘I didn’t create this moment for you and Doug,’ He seemed to say. ‘I created it for you and me.’ And together we danced in the moonlight.”

The world is a beautiful place, in other words, but men are oblivious, hopeless. As solace, Delilah presents romantic ballads about idealized lovers, narratives about children as cherubim, praise hymns about our Lord, our father.

Mary calls to reminisce: “Mama’s Nativity had a music box in it that played ‘Silent Night,’ but it was very old. I think she bought it before she and my father met. Some of the chimes were broken, so our ‘Silent Night’ was very strange, but we all liked it.”

Delilah laughs and says, “It was nearly silent.”

Mary says, “No, it wasn’t nearly silent. It just was—you missed a lot of the melody and you got a lot of the accompaniment, which made it very unusual. My dad did woodworking as a hobby. One summer he got a catalogue that had music boxes, so without telling anybody, he ordered a ‘Silent Night.’ He got out the Nativity scene, changed the music box, and threw away the old broken music box.”

Delilah: “And it was never the same.”

Mary: “And it’s still not the same. Every one of us can still sing the old ‘Silent Night’ that played on that music box for so many years. When we wound it up and heard that it was correct, we all just really attacked him. He didn’t know. He thought he was doing us a favor. And we were like, ‘Oh, Daddy! How could you do that to us?’ But we all still can sing that ‘Silent Night,’ that unusual version of it.”

Delilah: “Let me hear it.”

She hums the tune.

Once, a long time ago, something happened. It’s never been the same since. It was Dad’s fault. We’ll sort of forgive him and we’ll sort of not forgive him. What sustains me is the broken music box, which Dad inevitably tries to fix and isn’t fixable and is me.

Love is illusion

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing , which my sister—one year older than I am—was obsessed with in high school and now has no recollection of whatsoever, centers on the romance between Walter (Timothy Bottoms), a depressed American college student, and Lila (Maggie Smith), who is old enough to be his mother and is dying. She possesses an odd beauty—bug-eyed, with a classical look resembling the androgynous-faced female personifications of Dusk and Dawn that Michelangelo sculpted for two tombs in Florence. You can tell how relaxed she’s feeling by whether her hair, bottle-red and somewhat thinning, has been pinned back like a naughty librarian’s or allowed to flow and tickle her shoulders. Rigid and prudish, or perhaps just very British, she wears mostly polyester dresses and tailored skirt suits, which, though modest, showcase her Barbie-doll legs.

One night she completely loses it, drinking hard liquor from a bottle shaped like a flamenco dancer, smoking a cigar in her hotel room, and writing “Adios” in lipstick on the mirror—her hair very much down, yellow and red suicide pills in her khaki lap, red-brown liquid stains on the chest of her blouse. Otherwise, Lila maintains a manicured appearance and modulates her tone of voice. When feeling ill, she recites a couple of (misremembered) lines from Pirates of Penzance to soothe herself: “The glass is rising very high/It will be a warm July.”

When Lila wakes up the morning after her suicide attempt, Walter tries to convince her that life is beautiful. During his long speech, he flings open the windows and says, “You see? There’s joy in the world.” The sun shines hard into the small hotel room, but only a moment later, workers unload a black coffin from a hearse parked in the street directly outside the hotel room. Walter slams the window shut, leaving her chambers as dark as they’d been a few seconds earlier. In another scene, Lila and Walter get in bed together for the first time, and it goes poorly. Lila gets up and tries to make a nonchalant, composed exit from Walter’s hotel room but instead trips and collapses. Maggie Smith plays the scene totally deadpan, getting up from the floor, arranging her hair, and walking out with a pair of proper white underpants caught around her ankles.

She tries to teach herself—and then Walter—Spanish from a little primer. “ Amanece ” and “ oscurece ,” she says, asking him to repeat these sounds back to her. He has an atrocious ear. The first, she explains, means “it lightens”; the second, “it darkens.” Dawn comes, then night. She seems unintentionally to be transmitting to him some deep, basic wisdom.

Throughout the film, their relationship proves herky-jerky. The sun comes out, but then the rain comes. “And what have you learned about me?” Lila asks. “That you can hurt me,” he replies, very much in love. Rain leaks into the road-tripping trailer in which they sleep one angry night together, which turns into many future happy nights. He steps on the gas (of life) and she puts on the brakes (of death). He’s never been happier. The question that haunts the entire movie: How does sex feel for someone on the verge of an early death—what squats in the parentheses, poised next to an orgasm? In the end, she dumps him via a handwritten letter: “My dear Walter, I know this is cruel…” Amanece. Oscurece .