Brian Doyle

An annotation* on "One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder"

The subtitle Notes on Wonder steps on the toes of the lovely River of Song metaphor, eagerly interjecting this spoiler to tell us plainly what the book is really about. Doyle invites us to gape alongside him at glittering moments. Whether innocent or horrific, monumental or unsung, momentary or enduring, or all six of these together, he holds them up in wonder, packing an extraordinary amount of joy and pain and honesty and awe into remarkably short pieces, hewn from long rambly sentences, playfully turned phrases, and uncommon words carefully chosen to earn the reader’s attention.

Doyle’s voice is, for me, infectious. He bestows a mood of wise reflection, unhurried but not wasteful, a poet on his day off. His sentences meander, winding along to make claims and then modify them, burbling downstream in a flow that sounds more like thinking than speaking, lulling us into the unhurried comfort of a Sunday stroll, until we are surprised to see it end.

To mark our path, he draws from an ample supply of pristine phrases, as in this fragment:

“…drowsing between my alpine dad and willowy mother, in a pew filled with brothers seated with parental buffers so as to reduce fisticuffery…”

He loves precise and evocative language and savors surprise, but he loves his readers even more and so remains a gentle voice, always easy to follow.

Doyle does heavy lifting in short essays without feeling dense. He is plainly smart but not intellectual. He is both playful and serious. Despite the confident strokes and careful crafting, he retains a sense of groping, of feeling his way forward, just one clumsy stumble ahead of his reader.

His craft abounds in astonishing and often understated ways. But I am most impressed by how his heart is revealed. He pushes further than most into tender spaces. Consider this portion of his essay on humility entitled, “The Final Frontier”:

…but humble never really registered for me because I was not humble, and had no real concept of humble, until my wife married me, which taught me a shocking amount about humility, and then we were graced with children, which taught me a stunning amount about humility, and then friends of mine began to wither and shrivel and die in all sorts of ways including being roasted to death on September 11^th and I began, slowly and dimly, to realize that humble was the only finally truly honest way to be in this life.

So much is happening in here. Presenting humility by regretting his lack thereof opens this section with a playful sense of self-negation. The layered meanings send out poetic ripples, yet any pretension is undercut by a voice that would sound more at home on a porch than at a coffee shop open mic.

The smile which began for me at “was not humble” broadens at “married” and again at “children” only to evaporate in the terrific turn to death. The structure builds like a joke: the first observation is funny, the second amplifies the humor and establishes a pattern, so we can be surprised by the turn in the third. When he delivers the punch line, it is not comedic, but lands in the gut. And yet, this brutal end is where we see tenderness.

He doesn’t leave death in the abstract, nor drop us into a scene of sitting vigil beside a deathbed. Instead, he says “wither and shrivel and die” describing the sight of a close friend dying. Perhaps quickly in a fire or, like Doyle himself, slowly over months. The image suggests many visits, spanning multiple stories, each of which defines tragedy, displayed here with clarity through the eyes of a horrified friend who can offer only his presence and a willingness to bear witness. The surprising turn, visceral detail, and tear-filled, open-eyed gaze usher in a poetic range of connotations around the inevitable, natural end of all living things: to shed vitality and then life.

In arguing for humility, many might set up the folly of hubris. Or help us picture the contemptible sight of the proud and powerful. We would all like to be better than those fools, yes? Yet Doyle will not leave us taking humility as one more way to prove ourselves superior. Instead, he drains all pretense from the room and reminds us that in the end, there is nothing we can do to preserve our strength, stature, or status. We will all die. Between now and then, each day is a gift. He doesn’t exhort us to be humble. He shows us what humbled him and invites us to partake of the antidote.

It was a brain tumor that led to Brian’s death in 2017 at the age of sixty. As the end approached, Doyle blessed the effort of his good friend, David James Duncan, to compile four score of his best loved essays into this book. Duncan hoped they would provide some financial support for the family Doyle left behind, each purchase adding a drop to that stream. Yet the reader is the greater beneficiary, receiving these many pages of wonder, distilled and concentrated in the keen observations of a man who worked so hard to articulate “the only finally truly honest way to be in this life.”

The book: One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder

*An annotation is my attempt to explore some aspect of craft through an extraordinary work. I describe it more fully in: To Write Better, Read Better