Alone Together

Like a Marc Chagall painting, in which a couple is the focus, often floating between earth and sky, surrounded by other suggestive images, poet Grace Schulman’s memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, keeps her long marriage to Jerome (Jerry) Schulman in focus, while incorporating other elements. Numerous pictures merge in her account: a picture of Greenwich Village in the fifties when Schulman came of age and the picture of a young feminist, informed by her mother’s teaching and Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing on freedom and choice, unwilling to be trapped in “the snare of family life.” She also depicts the literary landscape in New York City across her professional life as a professor at Baruch College (CUNY), director of the 92nd Street Y, and poetry editor of the Nation. However, it is Schulman’s picture of her marriage, forged early on, lasting a lifetime with a separation of more than a decade (during which time they still saw each other though they lived apart) that colors and connects the whole, yielding a compelling emotional resonance. The subtitle for Shulman’s book “Portrait of a Marriage” suits the author’s intent and accomplishment well. Epigraphs at the start of her book from Novalis and Marianne Moore, whose poem “Marriage” also inspires the book’s title, point the way.

For Schulman, her felicitous meeting of Jerry in Washington Square leads to early love, a marriage proposal after the first week, marriage vows two years following, and a fifty-seven-year marriage shot through with joys, disappointments, and betrayal, and, finally, the pain of a beloved mate’s death in 2016. Schulman candidly explores the tensions within their relationship and the transcending power of love to mend fissures, enabling not only happiness, but, in some ways, a truer union. By example, the book seems to ask: what union is meaningful if it is not tested? While Schulman’s marriage is specific to her and while she makes no claims about marriage generally, readers may glimpse something familiar in her finely rendered account, especially the human reluctance to speak about difficult matters, even with the person to whom one is closest, and the joy, if lucky, to find marriage bonds strengthened over time. There’s no doubt that whatever challenges the pair faced (his infertility, the tragic death of Jerry’s mother in a car crash, and his continuing affair outside the marriage after they resumed living together), their mutual love and respect remained mysteriously intact.

Grace and Jerry seem to have been perfectly suited to each other with respective professional goals and shared interests in music, travel, and friends. Raised on New York’s upper west side, Schulman’s development was informed by the company of her parents’ friends, including then director of MOMA’s exhibitions, Monroe Wheeler; Gotham Book Mart founder, Frances Steloff; and, most significantly, Marianne Moore, who became an influence in her life and whose comment on her girlhood poems is as funny as it is honest and kind: “The flawless typing shows the work to its very best advantage and is in itself is a great pleasure.” As a young doctor and researcher at Cornell Medical College who went on to groundbreaking research on the influenza virus and vaccine, Jerry impressed Schulman with “his intense gaze of an El Greco saint” and “his relentlessly inquisitive mind.” He was also her fiercest encourager, shielding her from rejection slips in the mail, listening to drafts of her poems, even promising to stay alive to see her accept the Poetry Society of America’s 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, which he did. As she writes: “We cheered each other’s dreams.”

The young woman who feared marriage and was conflicted after nursing Jerry through an early bout of flu (“Would I be tending this man forever, at the expense of my freedom?”) comes to see in tending him during his final years of illness that: “It provided a closeness I’d never had with anyone...