Happiness That Sleeps with Sadness

More than twenty-five years ago when he did a reading in Sioux City, Iowa, I first met Jim Welch and his wife, Lois, and I have been grateful to get to know them over the decades. Even during that first meal we shared in a café afterward, I felt a rare, confidential mix of challenge and affection from them both. It seemed to be their implicit challenge to meet the highest standards of expression and honesty, while they both gave their quiet approval and affection for whatever efforts I could make in that direction. They seemed perfectly matched to support each other that way, to encourage good writing and honest speaking. I hope we can all help Lois now.

Jim always dodged superlatives, but I can say that he was one of the least sentimental and most sensible people I ever encountered. He was genuinely the least romantic and the most relentlessly realistic person, but at the same time he was so fully engaged and caring. Somehow he managed to be both penetratingly astute and nonjudgmental. His immediate warmth and chipmunk smile were driven by lion eyes that both sparkled and burned. He looked at the world and at suffering with so little self-pity and so much spontaneous feeling.

His words, of course, were thus constantly surprising, concise, piercing. From the first line in his first book, his language shakes with a strength that, for lack of a better phrase, might be called hardheaded tenderness. It gives his lines a constant edge of polar ultimates, of life and death. And he faced even death with a straightforward clarity. A few weeks before he died, my wife, Kate, and I had Jim and Lois over for dinner, and I asked Jim what he was working on these days, whether he was continuing the sequel to Charging Elk. He said casually that he was not taking on any big projects, now that he did not have much time.

Lois explained a few days after he died that when Jim was deep in writing a book, especially Fools Crow, it was as though he lived in that other world, interacting with everyone else politely but perfunctorily. She thought that in those last few months he did not want to disappear into that writing world and that he chose instead to interact and to stay close to his friends and family.

He embodied that hardheaded tenderness. In his expression, he gave that impossible balance a moving literary form. Toward the end of Fools Crow, the narrator describes a way of dealing with the pain of history as “a happiness that sleeps with sadness.” That is what we get to live with now: happiness to have heard his voice, sadness that Jim is gone.