I wonder a lot about whether or not you can separate an artist from their art. On the one hand it seems obvious that you can – we often fall in love with music or poems or paintings without knowing a thing about their creator. On the other hand, all art is shaped by the artist’s experience and I usually find that knowing about their life completely changes the way I understand their work (not always for the best).
Mary Oliver is a perfect example. Her writing speaks for itself and her poems are beautiful and meaningful, completely independent of the writer. I felt an intuitive connection to her words long before my fascination with her began. But learning about her life has allowed me to read her poetry with a deepened sense of empathy and comfort.
You can intuit certain core things about her by the themes of her writing – that she had been intensely in love, that she spent a lot of time in nature, that she had some darkness in her life. She was a very private person --- never much one for interviews – but from the rare few that she granted during her life, she spoke openly, and it’s from one of them that I learned, for example, about how the abuse that she suffered as a child drove her to naturally form a deep relationship with the non-human world.
But the most moving insight into her life comes from Our World, Oliver’s tribute to her love and partner of over 40 years, photographer Molly Malone Cook. The book is both Oliver’s eulogy to her departed companion and a memoir of celebration and gratitude for their life together. It’s a collection of Cook’s photos and journal entries, woven together by Oliver’s prose and a handful of poems. The result is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the life shared by these two extraordinary women – the intimate world of love and profound aliveness that they created for themselves.
Oliver writes about Cook, to whom she refers simply as M., with her signature elegant wit: “She was style, she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic – be feisty, and bold.”
They weren't each other’s first loves. Oliver notes that sometime around the late 1950s, Cook had an “affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… this love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed – not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much.”
It was soon after that they met for the first time. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble”, Oliver remembers – and as she was falling in love with Cook, she also fell in love with Provincetown. She describes the landscape of the seaside town with a painter’s eye: “…that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometimes visitors, the many artists and writers.” The pair decided to stay, and they made Provincetown their home for the remainder of their decades together.
“We were talkers,” Oliver reminisces, “– about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation.”
A photographer and a poet, they were poor – no need to euphemize --- and yet they lived with such intense fullness and presence: “We did not have much income. We had love and work and play instead.” Cook had her photographers’ gallery in town and Oliver spent her days “wandering around Provincetown’s woods and its dunes and its long beaches”, observing and experiencing the world – and, of course, writing about it.
Oliver doesn’t romanticize their poverty completely, recalling that the lack of income and the “urgency of suppers” added a new mandate to her wanderings – she collected supplies like berries, mushrooms, mussels, and wild bay along the way. She and Cook sometimes wandered together, and I love the image of the two of them, baskets in hand, meandering through the woods attentively, gently collecting their supper. “A pleasant place to shop, this land, and in almost any season.”
Success soon came for the couple, changing their lives as it does. “And we didn’t disdain restaurants, the exquisite and dainty and plentiful foods,” Oliver writes, “But neither did we ever forget the pleasures of our simplicity, our so-called hard years.”
Later on in the book, she reflects on one of the most powerful ways in which Cook changed her understanding and experience of the world. It’s such a beautiful passage I don't think I could ever paraphrase properly, so here it is in full:
"It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness – an empathy – was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely. All the years I knew her she had this gift, which is also sometimes a burden, with our life friends, with me, and with the faces and even the objects that found their way into her pictures. I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words – to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles."
This notion of attention, with all of its feeling, openness and empathy, pours out of all of Oliver’s poetry. My favourite example comes from her poem The Gift, in which she finds a shell along the sea shore. What a beautiful shell, any of us might say before tossing it back onto the sand.
But instead, Oliver looks at it and imagines "its travels in the Atlantic's wind-pounded bowl." She so effortlessly saw past the world of the ordinary to reveal the mysterious beauty behind it all – a master of “seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles.” How special to know that this nature of her experience came so deeply from her relationship with M.
Above all, Our World is an extremely touching love letter – a beautiful insight into this private, inner world shared between two people.
Oliver bookends her prose with the same overarching thought. She starts by writing: “Though you have known someone for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything.” Bringing the memoir full circle, she then closes with one final poem, The Whistler:
All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.
Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.
I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle-
Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?
This clear, dark, lovely whistler?
In Oliver's interview a few years later with Maria Shriver, she was asked what she believes she’s done with her "one wild and precious life." She responds without hesitating: “What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved.” Reminds me of the beautiful words of Annie Dillard, on which I’ll end: “There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”
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