Norman Rush’s Brilliantly Broken Promise

LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times

Elsa and Norman Rush at home.

One afternoon at the end of the summer of 2011, on the shady porch of a little red farmhouse near High Tor, in Rockland County, N.Y., the novelist Norman Rush, vigorous at 77, revealed himself as a man of great frankness. "I completely betrayed her," Rush told me, astonishment in his voice over what he'd done to the woman sitting across from him, Elsa Rush, 76, his wife of 56 years.

The three of us were at a table messy with the remains of lunch, a pair of flies making drunken arcs above our empty plates. Broad-chested and white-bearded, with an expression alternately jolly and severe, Rush looked to his wife. Elsa, as emotionally direct as Rush is conversationally frank, is a tall, unfussily elegant woman whom Rush often calls, both in and out of her presence and never emptily, "my beautiful wife." Looking off the porch of the house she and Rush have shared for half a century, Elsa was facing the lawned woodland adjoining us, sunken slightly in its center like a saddle.

"The way I put it to Norman," Elsa said, turning to her husband, "was, 'Whatever you want to write, that's fine.' If you had said, 'I'm going to spend 10 years, and I'm going to write a book about this — ,' can you imagine me saying: 'No! You're not going to do that!' Can you imagine it?"

In retrospect, Rush should have known that what he was doing could lead only to betrayal, given a set of statistics well known to them both. His first book, "Whites" (1986), a collection of stories that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, wasn't published until he was 52; his first novel, the 477-page, National Book Award-winning "Mating" (1991), took eight years to write; his second novel, the 712-page "Mortals" (2003), took 10 years. And yet, upon the appearance of "Mortals," Rush told Elsa — promised her — that his next novel would be a mere 180 pages and take two years to complete. But there we were on their porch in 2011, eight years later, and the "next novel" — "Subtle Bodies," which is at last being published this month — was, as of that date, quite a bit longer than 180 pages and still not finished.

"A hundred and eighty pages," Elsa said. "Taking two years. . . . You've never done anything like that before, so why did you persuade me?"

Throughout his career, Rush has been candid about Elsa's involvement in his writing. Not a literary spouse who stealthily delivers cups of tea to the genius in the attic, Elsa is what Rush calls "a partner in the process," which he describes as "a battle waged in common." Testimony on the depth of their artistic partnership may be found on the dedication pages of his books — dedications that are minor masterpieces of a characteristically trivial genre.

"Everything I write is for Elsa," begins the dedication to "Mating," "but especially this book, since in it her heart, sensibility and intellect are so signally — if perforce esoterically — celebrated and exploited. My debt to her, in art and in life, grows however much I put against it."

But as the years passed after the two-year deadline expired, Rush's debt to Elsa ("the last 10 years of extraordinary forbearance," as he writes in the dedication to "Mortals") compounded at an accelerating rate. The battle waged in common became a struggle Rush felt ashamed to share.

"Guilt will stop you in your tracks," Rush said, of the years that followed his promise. "And I began feeling guilty about this book when it diverged so radically from its original, simpler formulation. Because it was taking time out of our life when there are lots of fun things we could do if I just stopped writing."

For a fiction writer who has counted among his admirers the Nobel laureates J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, not to say a diverse generation of younger writers that includes Benjamin Kunkel and Tom Bissell, Rush's notion of stopping writing was neither desirable nor reasonable — least of all to Elsa, who says, with unfeignable ardor, "I love everything Norman writes!" As such, she found herself clearing their schedule — of cruises booked; hotels reserved; invitations from friends — when Rush needed to keep to his desk. Still, Elsa found it difficult not to grow distressed.

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for the magazine and senior fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

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