From a Deadly Accident, a Moving Memoir

In his latest memoir “A Step From Death” (Counterpoint, $24), Larry Woiwode gives verbal shape to his life. Writing from the vantage point of his mid-sixties, on the cusp of a near-death experience, and seeing his house empty of his children as they go off to live their own lives, he gives what the literary scene has been, of late, too long without: the novel that grapples with the individual experience in a deeply personal and spiritual way.

Early in the memoir, “I did fear death when I was twenty, imprisoned in undefined stubbornness, resistant to anybody who tried to pry their way into me, while I imagined a future with strangers crowding through doors and turnstiles across the continent just to shake my hand, and that would show them, those inclined to tamper and pry. That was my outlook until a day when I went for coffee after a class at the university…and with a jolt realized that the “I” at my center might not be any more substantial than the smoke from a Lucky Strike I coughed up at the thought.” He is creating, through memory, the beginning of his life, which has somehow—however misdirected or illogical it might, at times, have seemed—led to the person he has become.

And it is a journey of harrowing proportions, through the fundamental elements which give life its beauty and terror—the joys and uncertainty of marriage and children, the haunting ghosts of dead mothers and fathers, the search for meaning and truth substantive enough to give life discernible meaning, the stress and struggles (and eventual relief and affirmation) of professional literary writing and publication, the pangs of recognizing individual vice and inadequacies, and the search for redemption from deeply embedded personal faults through love. There’s more.

While the work is addressed to Woiwode’s only son Joseph, and at times it’s so particularly personal it’s almost as if one is peering too closely into a neighbor’s window. The memoir succeeds in bringing to the surface those fundamental feelings and bonds, rebellions and submissions, anger and love, that form the basis of father-son relations. Woiwode can stun the reader in a single line, reveals truths about all human relations.

When Woiwode speaks of his son’s miraculous escape from serious injury when a gun accidentally goes off, he writes, “Your head. That spring you were on crutches, listless, gripping the rattling aluminum prods with both handles in one hand when you sat, your head hanging, and once off them you left for Bismarck, where you worked as an apprentice mechanic to a private pilot and walked or rode a bicycle to build up your leg, and swam in the Heart River’s turbulent entry into the Missouri, jumping off a railroad bridge to do that, or so somebody told me. You never did. The wounded are the last to be received with open arms, and the first to accept sacrifice.”

There is the spirit of a philosopher, a poet, a father, and a son in these lines, and they resonate with the simplicity of style that commands the work.

Throughout A Step From Death Woiwode occasionally draws on Shakespeare’s Hamlet—that existentially oriented prince of a corrupt political state—to make points about his own development as a young man, and like Hamlet who struggles with his absent father, through the politics and material obligations that bind him, he eventually comes to a higher understanding within himself, that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.”

Woiwode mirrors that development in his own life. He was a young writer struggling within and against material obligations and spiritual dilemmas; lived in New York, with punctuated jaunts to Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Dakota; attempted to navigate a desire for a father-son relationship with William Maxwell; negotiated the give-and-take of marriage, understood what it means to be a father to a child and the father of oneself; recognized his flaws as a husband and father, and all the while on that search for truth that gives solace and peace to the individual human life.

As with Hamlet, Woiwode after nearly killing himself in moment of carelessness, simultaneously also has a moment of recognizing something about the limitlessness of a materially limited life—and understands that while one cannot, perhaps, give words and meaning to all experience, one can like the existential Hamlet discover, nevertheless, that “the readiness is all.”

In doing that, Woiwode, by the end of A Step From Death, standing alone on his farm and having understood something of his own aloneness now that all of his children are grown and gone, comes to the spiritual affirmation of realizing that his very existence is a testament to the love of so many others, which endures beyond the single individual; and that wherever each of us is (or thinks to be) in own steps from death, the magnificence of life is always at hand, and will always overshadow and triumph the material finality which is the destiny of all.