Nonfiction

---

The Double Legacy: Reflections On A Pair
Of Deaths

By Rachel Hadas. Faber & Faber. 165 pp.

"Grief cannot be given away," Rachel Hadas writes in "The Double Legacy," a collection of fifteen ambitious and elegiac essays, many of which were first published in Ploughshares and The Harvard Review. The book tells the story of the death of Hadas' mother, Elizabeth Hadas, who died of cancer in May of 1992, and of the author's dear friend Charles Barber, who died of AIDS a few months later. Hadas' philosophical meanderings on mourning at times seem academic and vague, and thus distancing. The book is overstuffed with quotes ranging from Shakespeare, Rilke and Homer to Marianne Moore, John Ashbery and Franz Kafka. It's understandable that the author of ten books of poetry and prose -- Hadas is also professor of English at Rutgers University -- would grasp for famous, brilliant words to console her. Yet the simple, colloquial details she provides are more fresh and illuminating and better render the depth of her personal loss; at one point, Charlie and her mother were in different wings of the same hospital, so that their telephone extensions branched off the same number. She critiques letters of condolence and is particularly annoyed at one in which the writer uses the words "surcease" and "amelioration." The author thinks that her mother, a former Latin teacher, would never have condoned such pedantries. Though she quotes "In Memoriam" by Tennyson ("Can calm despair and wild unrest/Be tenants of a single breast/Or sorrow such a changeling be?") one feels closer to the poet when she simply admits: "Among the people I see every day, I can't help trying to find Mommy and Charlie."

--Susan Shapiro

---