The Third and Only Way: Reflections on Staying Alive

by Helen Bevington

In this autobiographical volume, the remarkable Helen Bevington looks for answers to the question of how to live or, more specifically, how to confront growing older. A familiar face on the literary landscape since the mid-1940s, Bevington contemplates the course of her own life in view of the suicide of her father, the final years her mother spent in unwilling solitude, and the tragic suicide of her son following a crippling automobile accident from which he could never recover. How is one to face the inevitability of death? What is the third alternative? How to persevere in life?
The unique Bevington way of autobiography recreates lessons and insights of other lives, historical figures, and compelling incidents, and combines them in a narrative that follows the emotional currents of her life. Evoking a wide range of historical and literary figures, including Chekhov, Marcus Aurelius, Flannery O’Connor, Simone de Beauvoir, Thoreau, Beatrix Potter, Sappho, Yeats, Alexander the Great, Montaigne, Saint Cecilia, Virginia Woolf, Liv Ullmann, and many others, Bevington finds in these lives a path that has guided her search away from solitude. Through her reflections on the ten years that followed her son’s death, we become aware of how far she has traveled, how the search has brightened, how she has eloquently evolved into old age. In the end she is sitting, like the Buddha, under her own fig tree, waiting not for death but for further illumination.
An original contemplation of the universal dilemmas and tragedies of existence, The Third and Only Way is at once warm, funny, and inspiring—full of learning and wisdom.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 1996

About the author

Helen Smith Bevington (1906–2001) was an American poet, prose author, and educator.

Bevington was born in Afton, New York. Bevington was reared in Worcester, New York where her father was a Methodist minister. Bevington attended the University of Chicago and earned a degree in philosophy. She proceeded to write a thesis about Thoreau, earning a master’s degree in English from Columbia University.In 1928, she married Merle M. Bevington (1900–64). The couple travelled abroad, returning in 1929 in response to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Both Bevingtons taught English at Duke University starting in the 1940s, Helen retiring in 1976.

In addition to her 12 books of poetry and essays, Bevington's work appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorkerand The American Scholar. Bevington was a poet, a diarist, and an essayist. She was also a winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry (1956) and the Mayflower Cup (1974) both given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association;[3] and the North Carolina Award for Literature (1973). Charley Smith's Girl (1965) was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

(from Wikipedia)