NONFICTION
“Barefoot to Avalon”
David Payne
Atlantic Monthly Press, $27, 304 pages
When novelist David Payne first heard the voice in his head urging him to write about his younger brother who had died six years earlier, his “first thought was that it might be something wistful, elegiac, something like ‘A River Runs Through It.’”
His mother, who knew better, begged him not to.
But Payne was drowning. “My single-jigger vodka had become a double and I was often having double doubles and, on bad days, triple doubles…” His marriage was on the rocks, and worst of all, he had become his father: a manipulative, angry husband who drank.
“Everything I vowed not to repeat I have repeated,” he realized, and the life he had built in Vermont to escape his past had begun to look a lot like what he was running from. So he set to work on the story that began long before his brother, George A., volunteered to help Payne move back to North Carolina in 2000.
Their relationship was fraught with jealousy, rivalry and David’s long-standing resentment of George A.’s dependency on their mother as a result of a bipolar disorder that left him unable to work. But they had bonded again during the week of packing up David’s belongings.
“We picked it up where we’d dropped it somewhere long before, as if no time had passed at all. In the middle of a bad thing, I got my brother back.” And then, on the second day of their drive, David watched helplessly in his rear view mirror as his brother’s car and trailer jack-knifed across the interstate, and George A. was killed.
Out of that day, and the grief, guilt and desperation that followed, comes “Barefoot to Avalon,” a memoir as raw, intimate and courageous as a series of midnight confessions fueled by a bottle of vodka. The story is loosely chronological, though Payne lays out much of what’s to come in the opening chapters, then goes back, relentlessly and often, to gather evidence in an attempt to understand George A.’s illness and “who my brother was and who we were together.”
Between Payne’s revisiting of the wreck, which bookends the memoir, he opens the vein of his family relationships with unswerving, bitter intensity. He examines his childhood and his parents’ marriage — a grim and violent affair marked by his father’s drinking, threats and broken promises — for clues to his brother’s madness and his own demons.
The narrative follows George A.’s repeated episodes — “manic highs followed by protracted, crippling depressions” — beginning with the first at 17, the last in 1991. Though years passed during which he was “seemingly normal and high-functioning,” each new episode was more evidence that he might one day never recover.
Yet Payne expected him to, always. What he didn’t expect was that his own life would crash just as ferociously, that he could not outrun the family curse. And that the only way to break the spell would be “to write about George A.”
Payne, a North Carolina native and founding member of the Queens University MFA Program in Charlotte, has written five novels, including “Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street” (1984) and the autobiographical “Ruin Creek” (1993). His memoir is novelistic in its flashbacks, fluid time and poetic echoes — passages that repeat verbatim, pointing the reader to key scenes in Groundhog Day fashion.
At times, the prose seems more ranted than written, an avalanche of thoughts and memories in which no metaphor is too grand to describe the agonizing journey they’re all on: a spaceship adrift, the sinking Titanic, a voyage to the bottom of the sea, the Iran hostage crisis, a crime scene, WW II.
He blames family dysfunction — his father’s a hustler who pits his sons against each other, his mother a helpless enabler; toss in alcoholism, insanity and suicide on the maternal side — for the “black hole” of need his brother turns into. Desperate to see George A. as curable, he chalks his brother’s disorder up to “the old family sickness, hostile dependency, by which the weak and sick and injured depend upon and hold the strong ones hostage, and the strong ones, in the name of goodness and self-sacrifice, help the weak and disable them entirely.”
Believing himself passed over for the parental love and approval his brother won with ease, Payne plays Cain to his brother’s Abel, nursing a sense of injustice matched only by his equally monumental guilt. Not until he goes back far enough and often enough does he begin to see beyond his grievances; his story, which has been operating in the dark, finally opens into the light of self-awareness:
“… I’ve fancied myself a truth-teller all along, fancied I’d been telling it for 25 years in fiction, speaking about myself, my life, my loves, my family relationships, wearing various masks and straining it through various filters. But suddenly today I realize I wasn’t. I’ve kept who I really am a secret, not just from the world, but from myself. And now I think I have to tell it ….”
In a heartbreaking epilogue, Payne recognizes that “the truth which I resisted longest and found most shaming … feels like my treasure, a jewel, if a dark one.” His barefoot journey, every brave and bloody step over broken glass, shows how even the darkest emotions and deepest wounds can yield to love.
