Sons and Heirs: Lorene Cary’s Latest
August 7, 2011
Recently I finished Lorene Cary’s latest novel, If Sons, Then Heirs, another fine and highly readable book from one of Philadelphia’s most respected authors. Lorene is well known locally for her community work with the Art Sanctuary, but as a reader I’m happy to see she’s not neglecting her own writing.
Featuring several generations of a single family, If Sons, Then Heirs combines a fairly simple present-day story with an intricate and complex revelation of the family’s past. The genealogical tree that appears early in the book should help readers keep track of the many characters who roam the pages. Unfortunately, I read the Nook e-book version, on which the chart is illegible, and so I was constantly struggling to remember, for instance, how Binkie is related to Lil Tootchie. (Great names throughout!)
Roughly, the present-day plot goes like this: Rayne, an African American man who runs a construction business in Philadelphia, stands to inherit the old farm on which his great-grandmother, Selma, is living in South Carolina. Yet because of racist property laws and contracts, the ownership of the land is in question. As Rayne begins to tackle this issue, he is contacted by his mother, Jewell, who abandoned him to Selma’s care decades ago. Rayne also faces a decisive point in his relationship with his girlfriend, whose son has just begun to call him “Dad.” That’s four generations right there—or five, if you count the one skipped between Jewell and Selma—and the author will add cousins, aunts, uncles, stepfathers, and more to the troop.
At first, Rayne isn’t particularly interested in digging up his family’s history, but inevitably, in confronting the land issues, he must uncover a good deal more than he ever wanted to know. Having tried my own hand at stories that dredge up the past, I was intrigued with the tone of this book, which strikes me as an interesting mix.
From the start, we know from all the elements that form a tone—the style, the positive resolution of small incidents, the degree of humor and warmth, the preponderance of good people, etc.—that nothing really terrible will happen to the main characters in the present-day story. I refuse to label that comment with a “spoiler alert” because the comfortable tone is evident from the first chapter. Yes, Selma is extremely old and doddering, and Jewell’s husband is sick with cancer. Perhaps one or both of these fine folks will die in the course of the novel—I won’t reveal that; see, I’m being good!—but, even so, that will not make a tragedy. We know that Rayne and Jewell will survive and most likely continue the relationship they have newly established.
The past is another matter. When Rayne descends into the dark cellar of this family’s history, he unearths not skeletons so much as bloody remains—the still-dripping evidence of racial violence. No humor and warmth there, just ugliness and calamity, and the author presents them in gory detail:
He raises the tire iron in his hand and the others stand clear of him, because he is swinging wild, hitting the hood, the car door, hitting [the victim’s] legs, shattering the windows, and grabbing through the window at the great, flailing, dangerous, bloodied body.… [He] cuts up his own arm. It bleeds onto the car door and down his side. He lets out war yells like an Indian.
What’s the effect of such a tragic, violent tale wrapped inside a warm and slightly sentimental one? Though I was interested in the gradual revelations of the past, I can’t say I felt suspense, because the outcome—the contemporary lives of the main characters—is already known. In fact, though the villains of the past have present-day descendants, with whom Rayne has to deal to resolve the land issue, Cary treats that story line summarily. Ultimately the past becomes a vivid, personalized history lesson more than a tension-filled story.
The lack of suspense hardly matters, however. Throughout, the characters are the strength of this work. They are big, passionate people struggling to do the right thing. Bringing the scattered relatives back together and understanding what happened to drive them apart—these are the keys to the family’s redemption, and that theme is what Cary wants us to take away from the novel. I’m taking it, and I won’t soon forget Rayne and Jewell and Selma. Another good read from Lorene Cary.
Adios, Len
August 7, 2011
The latest issue of Small Press Review contains some painful news for those in the small-press world. The magazine’s founder, Len Fulton, has passed away. Some obituaries appeared in the last week of July, but I missed them.
In addition to SPR, Len’s company, Dustbooks, has for decades published many invaluable reference books for the literary community, including one of my long-time bibles, The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses.
Though I never met Len, I’ve always considered him a fascinating figure. He lived in Paradise, for one thing (Paradise, CA, that is)—uprooted like me from the East Coast. Within the first decade after moving there, he published two fine novels: The Grassman and Dark Other Adam Dreaming—both now available only in used copies, I think. He wrote plays as well, and he had the gumption to get involved in local politics. (Politics in Paradise? Yes, afraid so.)
The current issue of SPR has an obituary by Len’s sister, Susan Fulton Raymond, and a eulogy by Hugh Fox. Among the notices online, here are a couple of good ones:
http://www.newsreview.com/chico/len-fulton-1934-8211-2011/content?oid=2977223
We’ll miss you, Len.
Beyond Bizarre: Karen Russell and the Swamplandish Style
July 27, 2011
From the cover of SWAMPLANDIA!
Breaking my tradition, I’ve celebrated my return from two months of overwork by reading a best-selling novel less than five years after its publication date. The book is Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and it’s inspired me to coin a new word for personal use, swamplandish, meaning outlandish/bizarre/wacky in an interesting way.
For those who haven’t read the book, here’s Donna Seaman’s description from Booklist, courtesy of Amazon:
Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the “rings of hell.” Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. It’s up to Ava, 13, to find her sister, and her odyssey to the Underworld is mythic, spellbinding, and terrifying. Russell’s powers reside in her profound knowledge of the great imperiled swamp, from its alligators and insects, floating orchids and invasive “strangler” melaleuca trees to the tragic history of its massacred indigenous people and wildlife. Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell’s archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air.
Normally I’d be turned off by the first sentence. I like reading about the world I know, which has never included alligator wrestlers. Normally, too, if I dipped into the book itself, I’d be annoyed by the extreme degree of exaggeration. The book’s literal story line does involve that so-called amusement park named the World of Darkness, where a popular attraction for the Lost Souls (as the customers are called) is a slide down the intestinal tract of the Leviathan. The jingle, sung happily by the Lost Souls, goes like this: “The Leviathan, the Leviathan, what a bargain! All that pain in a single afternoon!” Since it’s not quite satire—or far beyond satire—the tone often strikes me as camp, way-out-there for the amused smirk of being way-out-there.
Yet something kept me going with this novel. Part of it was the verve of the writing. Russell has vast buckets of energy, some of which she splashes into swamplandish metaphors. Here are some examples from early in the book:
Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered
dozens of alligators pushed their icicle overbites and the awesome diamonds of their heads through over three hundred thousand gallons of filtered water
I started to miss the same tourists I’d always claimed to despise: the translucent seniors from Michigan. The ice-blond foreign couples yoked into thick black camera straps like teams of oxen. The fathers, sweating everywhere, with their trembling dew mustaches. The young mothers humping up and down the elevated walkway to the Swamp Café, holding their babies aloft like blaring radios.
This style is both brilliant and fraught with contradictions that keep the reader off balance. The brilliance speaks for itself—trembling dew mustaches! But an actual leper doesn’t look at all like a star-spotted sky, and the allusion to a leper in a romantic descriptive passage adds a tonal jolt. An alligator’s teeth have the sharpness and slickness of an icicle but not the coldness or fragility. If the couples are “yoked” like oxen, they are attached to each other by those camera straps, but surely that’s not right. Babies are indeed like blaring radios, but nobody holds radios “aloft”; for that matter, how many mothers hold their babies “aloft”?
It may seem silly to analyze the logic of metaphors, but my point is that Russell must be deliberately keeping us off terra firma. The very style is swampy and ever-shifting underfoot, with beauty and ugliness and romance and weirdness jumbled together, sucking us toward the bottom of solid reality, if not beyond.
And the plot proceeds in a similar way. One could write an outline that would seem simple and realistic; as Janet Maslin said in her New York Times review (2/16/11), “Take away the wall-to-wall literary embellishments, and this is a recognizable story, if not a familiar one.” Yet the tone often verges on the magical. In fact, my favorite part of the novel was 13-year-old Ava’s expedition to Hell to rescue her sister, who has supposedly eloped with a ghost. Ava is accompanied by a strange adult known as the Bird Man, and for a good while, as they approached the doors of Hell in the lonely midst of the incredible wild swamp, I supposed we were heading off into magical realism.
(SPOILER ALERT.) I was rather disappointed, then, when the story crashed back to earth and the magic disappeared. The end, lepered with impossible coincidences, is rather sentimental in its reunion of the splintered family. Yet exactly none of the family’s problems have been solved, and we leave them in a dreary mainland apartment “carpeted and wallpapered in rusty browns, a palette that reminded me of dead squirrels.” It’s a peculiar and off-kilter happy ending.
Maybe that, too—optimism in the face of death, madness and depressing decor—deserves the adjective swamplandish. Thanks to Karen Russell for adding to my vocabulary such a potentially useful word.
Flash! It’s Fiction
May 5, 2011
Recently I finished Randall Brown’s Mad to Live, a collection of flash fiction—a total of 22 stories in a well-spaced 69 pages. The book has been described as “edgy” and “postmodern,” and both of those terms are understatements. The book opens, for instance, with a pregnant woman eating ants, a craving that doesn’t faze her husband, who runs to the pet store to buy her a bag of crickets:
At home, in the garage, I hold up the bag. A cricket stares back; all eyes, bugs are. Crunchy. Gooey in the middle. Like pretzel snacks with cheese in the center.
Late in the book, a man gets the sudden feeling that people are pointing at him, accusing him of something. Searching the Internet, he finds no clues but determines to fight back:
I get the sense it’s more ridiculous than horrible, what I’ve done, the bad kind of fame, but the kind that goes away, like colds. I’ll wait it out.… When I find it, I’ll post a picture on lampposts and store windows and telephone poles and I’ll write in black permanent strokes “I’m not him,” and then they’ll know. Everyone will know.
This is highly skilled writing, but for my tastes too surreal, so I can’t pretend to review the stories as such. It’s an occasion, though, to think about the nature of the very short story that we now call flash fiction or microfiction. The editor of the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and FlashFiction.net, Brown has pondered the essence of the form, blogged about it extensively, and predicted its “imminent rise to power.”
Though definitions of the form differ, all the ones I’ve seen are based on length. Perhaps 50 words is the typical limit for “micro,” a few hundred words for “flash.” In Mad to Live, the shortest story falls just short of 200 words. The genre perfectly suits our short-attention-span, click-through, multitasking world, though it’s ironic that the Web, where this kind of fiction thrives, is also suited for long work that might be too expensive to print.
Many readers may assume, as I’ve always done, that a story so minimal in length must be more like a still shot than a video: zeroing in on one scene, one moment, with little scope for development or change. My own recent, semi-accidental foray into the short-short form falls roughly into that category:
TWO DEPARTURES
Each weekday morning when Dermot’s father left for work, he’d reach down to where the boy’s head drooped over a cereal bowl, ruffle his hair and mumble a slang farewell: “Later, kiddo,” or “Seeya, champ.” One day it was different. The boy finished breakfast and wandered into the living room to watch his mother and father loosely hugging at the front door. Setting out on a business trip, the man hefted his suitcase and called across the room, “Goodbye, Dermot.” The phrase, uttered through a tight grin, had such an oddly formal ring that Dermot cocked his head in surprise. When his father failed to return, joining instead a new family on the opposite coast, the words hardened in his memory like a thin layer of cement.
Skip ahead 27 years to a morning when Dermot’s live-in girlfriend Celeste stands at their apartment door with a carry-on slung over her shoulder. She is interviewing for a prestigious residency in a hospital 853 miles away (exact distance courtesy of Internet maps), and they have quarreled not about this subject, but around this subject, for the past two weeks, with the dispute so entangled in other matters that for much of the time he has lost track of the issues. As her glance angles up at him from under finely tilted brows—an expression that suggests a bemused take on her own irony—he briefly sees what she does: an unshaven, unshowered, slightly overweight academic holding a lukewarm mug of coffee that has slopped onto the sleeve of his tartan pajamas. An impulse moves him to beat her to the punch: “Goodbye, Celeste,” he says, with what he supposes is polite, forgiving affection. She nods, loses the ironic tilt, starts to speak and checks herself, and slips out the door.
Dermot returns to the kitchen. Above the sink a small window overlooks a courtyard where forsythia branches curl under a thin layer of ice. He has a sudden image, or fantasy, of his mother looking out a window like this. A flick of movement catches his eye, but when he tries to make out the bird or squirrel, nothing appears. With a jerk of the wrist Dermot pitches his coffee down the drain. “So long, kiddo,” he mutters, and heads to the bathroom.
[published in the July 2009 issue of decomP]
If we count generously, that story has three scenes, one in each paragraph, and the reader understands (I hope) that the first scene governed the last two, but there’s no character development except what is implied in the child’s progression to the man, nor is there significant plot.
Some practitioners of flash fiction don’t seem to accept such restrictions. They claim to be creating a story with conventional elements, just extremely compressed. Detailing how he critiques a flash story, Richard Grohowski writes: “Have the events in the story changed anyone? Is there a logical, or at least reasonable, progression from beginning to end?” (For more such theorizing about the way flash works, see the Flash Craft section of FlashFiction.net.)
Taking Brown’s stories as an example, some plot, or concentrated action at least—progression from beginning to end—does seem achievable. His story “Early Man” starts with a boy and his father finding a big wad of cash on the ground, and then proceeds to detail what they do with it, ending on the fourth page when the money is gone. Another story, “Good Kid,” is all action, its four pages describing an attempted robbery at a store and the fight that ensues as a boy and his grandfather resist the bad guys.
As for character change, there can be hints of that. “Good Kid” ends with a projection into the kid’s future, telling us that when bad dreams come, the boy will fight them off with memories of the moment of triumph with his grandfather.
Still, I don’t believe that real character development—important changes in essential traits or understandings—can be achieved in a couple of hundred words. Nor do I think that ultra-compressed plots can have the same kind of arc as a longer story or novel in which the characters’ motivation is integral to the buildup, the complications, the climax, and the dénouement.
If anyone can find a strong example contradicting these views, please share.
Strawberries, Pies, Books
April 28, 2011
Pie Eating in Seattle (from Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by Jmabel)
This weekend I’ll be visiting the Strawberry Festival at Peddlers Village in Lahaska, PA. Fran Grote and I will be hawking our novels at a table outside the Canterbury Tales Forever Bookstore, 10:00–1:00 on Saturday and 1:00–4:00 on Sunday. Come for the pie-eating contests, stay for the books. Note that Pennsylvanians will certainly be more refined than the Left Coasters in the picture. Feeding the authors is encouraged, but please do not throw pies.
Crossing Borders, Fictionally
April 9, 2011
Recently I went to an interview and reading by Elise Juska, author of three novels published so far and a fourth almost complete. Afterward, since I hadn’t yet read one of her books, I used my new Nook to download One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, the story of a woman who walks out of her uninspired marriage and then spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what to do next. Though I got a bit impatient for something to happen, I admired the writing style—vivid but not flashy—the depth of the characters, and the play with multiple languages (American, Irish, academese, and crossword-puzzle-ese).
Talking about her novel in progress, Elise mentioned that, for the first time in her work, a male character is becoming one of the central figures. He’s also 63 or 64, I think she said, a good deal older than Elise herself, and she was working hard to imagine this guy’s life and mentality.
The comment got me thinking about the many borders that fiction writers need to cross. Unless we want to write book after book about people exactly like us, we’re forced to stretch our imaginations into regions we don’t know firsthand. Well, maybe Hemingway knew a lot firsthand, but most of us haven’t been involved in a foreign civil war and two world wars, hung around with bullfighters, shot big game in Africa, and gotten soused in Cuban bars.
For me, the gender border, about which Elise was concerned, is among the easiest to pass over. I don’t know why, but a woman’s POV seems not that difficult to imagine, and so far none of my female friends has chastised me unduly for failing to understand female characters. Of course I haven’t a clue what makes my wife tick, but that’s different.
Class and ethnic borders are much tougher for me. Say, for instance, that my plot needed a tattooed tough guy from Chechnya who dropped out of school at age eight, helped bomb Russian military outposts, then fled to America to join a crime gang. I could probably describe him externally. (Let’s see, try Googling “Chechen tattoo”? I think he has to be bald, right, with a close-cropped fringe? Raw-boned, smooth-shaven face. Six-one, waist size 40? Slightly faded red T-shirt. Uh-oh, I think we’ve created a stereotype.) Getting inside his head, though, would be tricky; even after a lot of reading about every related subject, I might end up with a miscellaneous bunch of traits rather than a whole, breathing, cussing character.
When ethnic boundaries become “racial” ones, we also face social/political restrictions, real or imagined. Not being a Native American myself, do I dare use one as a main character? Even if I think I can understand him or her, would I be transgressing? How much should I care?
Oddly, too, borders of place are hard for me to cross, even in our globe-trotting times. It’s not the look of a far-off place that’s the problem; it’s understanding what it feels like to be there every day. If I lived in northern Siberia for a year, how would the cold and darkness affect my psyche? What does the Arizona desert smell like to someone who’s been there her whole life? If I stayed for a decade in the Northwest, would the rains depress me, fertilize my brain, or merely make me guzzle more coffee and start a garage band?
It’d be interesting to hear from a number of fiction writers about the metaphorical borders that trouble them most. As for Elise’s concern about her 64-year-old male, I think she can safely assume there’s an infinite variety of individuals in that category, probably even some bald Chechens. Her bountiful imagination is the only visa she needs.
The Literary Hibiscus: A Complaint About Symbolism
February 19, 2011
Back from the near-dead. Seventy-hour work weeks, snow, freezing temperatures, lack of sun, topped off by a virulent head-and-chest virus that apparently laid waste to Baltimore before attacking Philadelphia—all have made this a miserable winter. Granted, we’re sissies here in the mid-Atlantic, and I admit that I could never live in Minnesota, even if Garrison Keillor dropped by nightly to tell stories. Still, I enjoyed pitying myself, and if this is the only happiness one gets for months at a time, that qualifies as misery, doesn’t it?
In these lost months I’ve managed to read just one book, Chimamanda Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus. I haven’t yet tried her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, or her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck.
Purple Hibiscus, as the reviewers said, is a classy debut. Though the background is the Nigerian political scene, the focus is on a single family with a domineering father, passive mother, and two children trying to cope with the impossible situation created by the parents—something that should hit home for me, since I’ve written an American novel with the same setup. And I did respond acutely, enjoying even the long stretches when it seems the teenage narrator-protagonist, Kambili, will never get up the gumption to strike out for freedom from the oppressor. Adichie gives her characters enough complexity to challenge our simple presumptions: the abusive father has many good points, and the more attractive characters, while never verging on evil, have quirks to keep us interested.
She’s good at description, offering simple but vivid detail about daily life:
Obiora was pounding a yellow mango against the living room wall. He would do that until the inside became a soft pulp. Then he would bite a tiny hole in one end of the fruit and suck it until the seed wobbled alone inside the skin, like a person in oversize clothing. Amaka and Aunty Ifeoma were eating mangoes too, but with knives, slicing the firm orange flesh off the seed.
And a moment later, when flying termites course past the apartment complex:
The air was filling with flapping, water-colored wings. Children ran out of the flats with folded newspapers and empty Bournvita tins. They hit the flying aku down with the newspapers and then bent to pick them up and put them in the tins. Some children simply ran around, swiping at the aku just for the sake of it. Others squatted down to watch the ones that had lost wings crawl on the ground, to follow them as they held on to one another and moved like a black string, a mobile necklace.
It helps that the scenes are exotic to Western readers. We can read a sentence like
Lunch was jollof rice, fist-sized chunks of azu fried until the bones were crisp, and ngwo-ngwo.
with a fascinated hunger that we might not feel if the ingredients were more familiar:
Lunch was baked beans, fist-sized chunks of breaded chicken deep-fried until crisp, and cole slaw.
Still, the power of description is in the vivid, accurate details, and Adichie gets those right—as far as this Western reader can tell. (The azu does sound good, whatever it is. Wikipedia says it’s a Japanese R&B singer.)
The one crispy bone I have to pick with Adichie concerns the purple hibiscus, the title flower. In the novel’s extended family, Aunty Ifeoma, the liberal, liberating force, happens to grow an unusual purple hibiscus that her neighbors all admire. The narrator’s brother, Jaja, takes some of Ifeoma’s purple flowers to plant in the garden by his own house, and soon afterward he plucks up the courage to defy his father. At the end of the first section, the narrator makes sure we see the connection: “Jaja’s defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom. … A freedom to be, to do.”
I’m on a bit of a crusade against standard literary devices, which seem to me all too pervasive in contemporary writing, and this kind of heavy-handed symbolism, which I suspect Adichie absorbed from evil Western influences, ticks me off. The innocent hibiscus plant itself plays little role in the novel; it’s there just to be loaded down with symbolism. Let it go free, I say, free from the burden of representing freedom! Liberate it from the novelist’s manipulation. And don’t make those flying termites into symbols either. If you build the meaning into the action, the characters, the setting—as Adichie has done so admirably—we readers don’t need symbols as a side dish with our crispy azu.
SHAME on Saturday
December 1, 2010
Click image to enlarge
It’s not such a bad day usually, Saturday, and for some it’s even a sabbath,* but this coming one, December 4, will be smudged by the official launch of my novel, The Shame of What We Are. The publisher is planning a joint celebration with Sowilo Press, which is launching my friend Debra Leigh Scott’s marvelous collection Other Likely Stories. Everyone who occasionally reads a book is welcome to stop by.
Debra’s book picks up in the 1960s, where mine leaves off, and ends with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Together the two books portray a troublesome quarter-century in American life, when we engaged in a nuclear arms race; persecuted our own citizens; fought in mysterious places in Asia; assassinated political leaders; invented, perfected, and then (in my opinion) destroyed rock ’n’ roll—and, somewhere along the way, undermined the traditional nuclear family. How much connection was there between public misadventures and private confusion?
I’m told the party will feature live music appropriate to the time period. If it’s disco, I’ll be hiding under a table.
*Which reminds me: Hanukkah has just begun here on the East Coast. To all who celebrate it, or wish they did, have a joyful one.
Nostalgia, Part 3: Clouds of Glory
November 2, 2010
William Wordsworth, from Wikimedia Commons
“. . . trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home . . .”
Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” offers perhaps the strongest explanation of the types of nostalgia that I’ve been exploring in recent posts.
Wordsworth’s poem is famous because he describes a universal sensation, the inkling that once—when?—we connected more deeply with life’s mysteries. That time at the beach, holding Mom’s hand, when we clambered out over the rocks—why is that scene stuck in the mind? what was it we saw or said? Or on that summer sidewalk in a far-off city, in the flickering leaf-shadows under a street lamp, we felt a stirring that seemed almost to tell us—
Uh-huh. Wherever quavers like that were tugging us, most of us never quite made the connection, and in time we got busy and ceased to think about it. That’s certainly true of me. In fact, I discount most of my adolescent mysticism as the fumes of an overheated sexual furnace. And yet, when I take time to reflect, I miss feeling that way. In my notes for a recent story, I jotted that the protagonist was “yearning for yearning,” that is, wishing he could once more experience the unfulfilled urges that drove him crazy as a young man.
Recently I had a chance to read a draft of Byblos, an extraordinary novel-in-progress by a friend, Miriam Seidel. It tells two stories that on the surface seem widely disparate: the burning of the great Alexandria library in the time of Caesar and Cleopatra (and, yes, those characters appear in the novel); and the personal travails of Nina, a female dot.com entrepreneur in the early twenty-first century. The modern-day plot takes Nina back to her childhood home in upstate New York, where she experiences mystical connections not only to her younger self but also to a kind of spiritual zone that ultimately connects the two plots. She realizes that, in some way, numinous sensations like these sustained her through her difficult years of growing up in a discombobulated family.
Normally I have minimal tolerance for mysticism, especially if it comes too easily (see my grumpy comments about “Suzanne” in “Nostalgia, Part 1”). But Miriam grounds her spiritual flights in a deep sensory appreciation of the earth and its creatures. At the old homestead, we get a vivid sense of the tangled trumpet vines, the pallid mushrooms, the worms, the stones, the mucky pond with its slimy frogs, the cicadas screeching in the summer heat—along with Nina’s attempt to rediscover something important from her childhood that has gone missing. Heading for the pond, she rips her legs on a patch of brambles. Opening herself to all of this, she reaches out tentatively to sense the hidden links that bind the people and animals and rocks and plants together. She can’t name or describe these links, but she ends up putting her sensations to use by—well, I’m not going to reveal the end of the novel.
This kind of mysticism is grounded enough, literally and figuratively, for me to appreciate, and I believe that Miriam’s version is truer than Wordsworth’s because it blends the ugly with the pleasant, the hostile with the welcoming, the scummy pond with the pretty trees.
Old Willie did have talent, though, and I don’t mean to diss him. He’s worth quoting for the final words on the subject:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Nostalgia, Part 1: Diaries and Heroes
October 30, 2010
After Marcy Casterline O’Rourke posted a rave review of my novel The Shame of What We Are on Amazon, I wondered who she was and why she liked the book so much. Exploring her own blog entries, I realized that we’ve both been pondering the past lately, and maybe that’s what first attracted her to Shame, which is set in the 1950s and 1960s. (Though this doesn’t explain her lofty rating of the novel; for that, we’d need to know what she was smoking.)
One of Marcy’s blogs focuses on her late husband, the actor Tom O’Rourke, and she talks about reading a diary he left behind, using it to fill in details of his life before she met him and puzzle out facets of his character that, after decades of marriage, she still didn’t understand. “The Great Mystery of Tom,” she titles one post. Her musings are both pointed and poignant.
Oddly (or perhaps not) I’ve just finished the first draft of a short story about a man who rediscovers his own adolescent diary. This proved difficult to write, because for me nostalgia is often painful. Beyond the poignancy and bittersweet pang, it leads to a deep sense of embarrassment about my younger self, and that happens in this new story, in which the character becomes ashamed of the young man he unearths.
Joanie & Bobby in 1963
Here’s another—not fictional but all-too-real—case in point: Last night I reconnected with a major icon from my youth. Our niece Anna, for no reason that we can fathom, has become a fan of folk music, and her greatest star, higher in the pantheon even than Pete Seeger, is Joan Baez. Hence we went with Anna and her family to Joanie’s concert last night in Philadelphia. Anna wore a handmade T-shirt with a 1960s image of our favorite folk diva; it must have taken her hours to draw with permanent markers.
So, there was the bittersweet sensation of remembering when Joanie (who looked a bit stiff and sore) was a young barefoot maid, and we too were young, and the music meant that the times they were a-changin’, that the deep achy yearning that swelled in our souls could find its place in the world and we would somehow connect not only with the zeitgeist but with the oversoul, the mystery at the heart of things.
It’s bad enough remembering inchoate hopes like that. But here’s where it gets really rough for me. The first time I saw Joan Baez in concert, she was indeed in her barefoot-maid stage, and a heckler yelled at her from the audience, “Why don’t you wear shoes?” She shot back, “That would spoil my image.” Today that seems a perfectly apt, funny reply. To my idealistic younger self, however, it was like a slap in the face. I wanted to believe, I guess, that she chose to go barefoot in the simple, honest, pure way in which I might grab a jacket out of the closet: “Hmm, it’s over 65 degrees and I’ll be on stage most of the night, so I won’t need shoes.” To realize that she might consider something as crass and commercial as her “image,” even with an ironic twist, shocked my entire belief system.
It’s painful to remember being that naive, that stupid. And to make matters worse, Joan sang the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne.” Not only was that once my favorite song, but I considered it truly poetic, profound, inspirational. A woman who dresses in rags and feathers and leads you to a mysterious river/harbor where you meditate upon Jesus walking on the water—heavy stuff, man! But today when I hear lines like “you know that you can trust her / For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind,” I feel the opposite of trust. Sloppy, simple-minded, juvenile, semi-fake spiritualism, I call it now.
So, picture me at the concert in a balcony cheap seat, uncomfortable with memories of idealizing Joanie, growing more restive as Cohen’s pseudo-poetry wafts in ethereal waves over the rapt audience. … My wife reaches over and lays her hand on mind. I squeeze back in reluctant acknowledgment. Then she leans in and whispers, “Remember when you used to sing ‘Suzanne’ to me? Will you sing it to me tonight?”
I want to hide under my chair.
Luckily, though, we’re old enough that, after the long concert, a bus ride to our neighborhood, a short hike to our door in the brisk fall air, we fall harmlessly asleep.
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