Helen Humphreys' Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother

A beautiful book with a beautiful cover, I think I will always be grateful to Helen Humphreys for writing Nocturne.

It's fascinating on a number of levels, and as usual there is an odd synchronicity in my reading. I'd just finished Therese Ann Fowler's novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and was reflecting on how unfair I've always been to Zelda, blinded by my fangirl reaction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Z, while fiction, makes a strong case for Fitzgerald's struggle to finish Tender Is the Night being not the need to support Zelda and Scottie, but for his own alcoholism and lack of self-discipline, his desire to party with and pretend to be one of the independently wealthy, as the reason he struggled with his novels.

To my surprise, Humphreys' elegy to and ongoing conversation with her brother Martin, who died at age 45 of pancreatic cancer, is a meditation not just on grief and loss, but also on the sacrifices inherent in choosing the artist's life. If you've read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Tillie Olsen's Silences, you'll already know how hard it is to be a woman and a writer - particularly a married woman and a writer. (Add children to the mix and it's amazing there are any female writers.) One of the things that makes Nocturne provocative is that Humphreys takes this idea one step further, renders it non-gender specific, and explains what is required (at least for her):

'...to write well, to write fully, to really get inside a novel, I have to leave the world I actually live in. I can't have distractions from the story, which means living alone, and creating an environment of calm and routine - wearing the same clothes day after day, eating the same food - so that nothing from the real world interferes with the creation of the fictional one.

Over the years this has worn me down and created a kind of loneliness that is hard to live with, and surprisingly hard to leave....

My being is enmeshed with what I do. And this is why, in spite of my desire to give up writing, I am writing to you one last time. Writing is what I have, and it's how I make sense of experience.'

Martin Humphreys was a concert pianist, composer, music teacher, son, brother, friend, boyfriend. You can still hear some of his recordings on his MySpace page, and I am listening to him play Leos Janacek's "Our Evenings" as I write this review. And I am close to tears, not because of the music but because of the sad truths of Nocturne:  "Increasingly I would rather live a perfect day than write about one...."