Life against Death: Pete Najarian’s Mutual in Love Divine

The old sobbing “with an endless grief . . . from somewhere deeper than memory” is here to stay. Nonetheless, the mother’s philosophy of family and love could be an antidote to the shocks and the hardships of life. Her 101 years of survival and endurance on this planet are evidence of it. Zaruhi loses her family on the death march. She survives her husband’s stroke in an alien land (it is, after all, “alien registration cards” that immigrants to the United States are issued). Indeed, the good-natured woman keeps her son, “such a troubled and unhappy person most of my life,” alive, uplifting him and nourishing both his life and his art.

The coda sums up the son’s struggles with his loneliness beautifully. Juju, the cat, gives him the family he has craved his entire life. Of course nothing changes. He still has to look forward to “another day of being human while you will be a cat.” Yet, the mutual love of the two (italics mine) creates the warmth the son needs to relieve his loneliness. A substitute perhaps, but also testimony to the desire to “‘Awake, awake’” from the shadows (Blake), and to let go of his sickness. In another episode, he draws “a thumbnail masterpiece in only a minute,” of “a very cute” Asian boy who happened to be sitting opposite him at a little table at the library. “It was one of the highlights of my life,” he writes, “since that little boy was the grandchild I never had.” Confronting the loneliness is vanquishing the alienation and the darkness.

The issue of life and death is complex and Najarian’s narrative plays the tension between the two superbly. “Freud’s Story” challenges the illustrious scientist’s theory of the inevitability of wars and the ultimate self-destruction of mankind with the peasant illiterate mother’s belief in the “sweetness of life.”

Eternal Eros, the other human instinct put forward by Freud in his Civilization And Its Discontent — ironically, “Freud’s greatest story” for the narrator — would master the instinct of aggression and stop the bombs and wars. The “good-natured and un-neurotic” mother — and there are millions like her — “would inherit the earth and hopefully save it.”

Mutual in Love Divine may return one to one’s own loneliness, but it does not invite despair. In some magical way, the beauty of Najarian’s art — the beauty of his words and paintings of landscapes and nudes generously interspersed throughout — supersedes the sadness of life. The book is Najarian’s gift to us. His “need to create” and to learn what art meant have made the telling of his tale possible. “I kept writing as if words would save me,” he writes.

The story Pete Najarian writes is the story Freud “was writing in 1929 before the atom bomb and the mass extinctions of life on the planet,” except that it now has Najarian’s signature on it. “Once upon another time in the year after the bomb, a woman around forty walked home from the factory at day’s end and climbed the three flights of stairs to the railroad rooms of the little apartment where her crippled husband sat on the small sofa between the stove and the kitchen window, her five-year old son playing with his toys on the linoleum and her sixteen-year old on his way home from his afternoon job at a soda jerk,” is exquisite writing. Mutual in Love Divine is Najarian at his best.