Returning to the old home place

I mentioned over the summer that one of the transformations on the road from childhood to adult life for me has been the elevation of Thanksgiving over Christmas. As a child, Thanksgiving was dull, whereas Christmas was a whole month of cheer capped by a day of absurd bounty.

Then, in 1996 when I was twenty-two, I was living in London in November, working in a bookstore, and I had to work on Thanksgiving. In the store, it was simply one more day along the march to Christmas--a march that for retail clerks at times feels just slightly less horrible than Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. And while my girlfriend and I had a pleasant dinner with fellow ex-pats, it was nothing like a real Thanksgiving. Can you have Thanksgiving properly with no one under 80 at the table? It seemed wrong then, and it would still seem wrong now.

So as Thanksgiving week slips up on us, bringing in its train the carnival of pell-mell nonsense that is the holiday shopping season in America, you could do far worse than to steal away and spend some quiet time with new books from Richard Russo and Wendell Berry.

Russo's Elsewhere is a memoir, primarily about his difficult, charismatic, problematic, possibly mentally ill mother--and the difficulty of figuring out, managing, and, eventually coming to terms with our earliest, most unguarded relationships. Russo is a man who left his hometown physically, but has never been able to shake it in his writing. (The one book in which he tried hardest to do so, Bridge of Sighs, is easily his weakest, its portrait of an American painter in Venice largely unconvincing.) Elsewhere could easily read like a final betrayal, a laying bare of secrets, doubts, and failures that his mother would never have acknowledged, much less wanted publicly aired. But it doesn't. Instead it is suffused with love, the sort of real love that enables us to overcome frustration, irritation, even the occasional twinge of instantly denied hate. And it reveals a real awareness of and sympathy for his mother's difficult position as a single parent in 1950s America. Take this analysis of her much-bruited independence, for example:

Except she wasn't, not really, and sometimes that terrible truth would punch through the defenses she'd erected and fortified at such a high personal cost. To her credit, she almost never shared her doubts, her temporary losses of faith, with me, her principal audience. She kept the narrative of our lives consistent and intact. We, the two of us, were all we needed. As long as we had each other, we'd be fine. For my part I never let on that I suspected the truth: that, yes, she had a good job, but that as a woman she was still paid less than men with the same duties. They had families to support, she was told, as if she didn't. By the time she paid for her ride to and from work and the clothes she needed to look the part there, she could have done almost as well working in Gloversville. Yes, she paid her rent faithfully, but at Gloversville, not Schenectady, prices, and my grandparents, though they never said so, could have charged anybody else more. And what would it have cost if she'd had to pay someone to look after me while she worked, a job my grandmother did, lovingly, for free?

In that passage, which comes early in the book, we begin to get hints of the layers upon layers of experience, interpretation, and emotion that Russo will unpeel in the book. As I read, I kept thinking of a lyric from a Tracey Thorn song, "This is just my heart laid bare." Russo, one of our greatest novelists, has bared his heart, and the result is compulsive, moving reading.

I alternated reading Elsewhere, chapter by chapter, with reading stories in Wendell Berry's new collection, A Place in Time. Berry has been writing about the same small patch of ground in northern Kentucky--a town and its people that he calls the Port William membership--for more than fifty years now, and every time he adds chapters our long-lensed image of his characters grows richer. Most of my reading of Berry occurred in a binge right before I started this blog, so I've not written much about him, but he's a writer I treasure like few others, funny and serious at the same time, and always, always deeply humane. Berry writes about people and the land, and the way that farming--and, by necessary extension--rural small-town life, changed inexorably with the rapid growth of mechanization after World War II. So he is writing about loss, fundamentally, but also about memory, and stories, and what makes a place and a people. One reason I find Berry's work so compelling is that growing up in a small town in rural Illinois, just north of the Kentucky border, through the tail end of the transformation (and, fundamentally, losses) that he describes: when I was a kid, Main Street in our town had a toy store, two men's clothing stores, a women's clothing store, a jeweler, a card shop, and more. But a K-Mart had recently opened, a Wal-Mart was on the way, and the last vestiges of a small-town, farm-town life that stretched back more than a century were fading. By the time I left in 1992, it was all gone.

Berry, who as a young man left and then returned to his rural Kentucky birthplace, can occasionally be didactic in his evangelizing for the local, the small, the sustainable. But those moments are overwhelmed by the beauty of the larger web he weaves, a tapestry of interlocking families, friends, and rivals stretching from before the Civil War to the present. Every story he writes--and, remarkably, every story he's written since his first book, when he was only twenty-six--is shot through with an awareness of time and loss, and of the importance, to ourselves if to no one else, of remembering the stories of those who've gone before. Thinking about Thanksgiving brought to mind this passage, from the story "At Home", which simply follows the thoughts and memories of Art Rowanberry, an aging World War II veteran, as he walks across country he's walked countless times:

The river valley was out of sight behind him now, the creek valley lying fully open ahead of him. Though the light had weakened, he could still see the house, the barns and outbuildings, the swinging bridge over the creek, at the end of nowhere the center of everything, and the day coming to rest upon it.

He knew he would walk on the earth a while yet, and then he would yield back his body to be with the old ones who had come and gone before him, and of this he made no complaint.

This, it seems to me, is what Thanksgiving, properly taken, asks of us. Next weekend, as I walk near my parents' house, and look out over vistas revealed by the autumnal stripping of the trees and fields, I'll be thinking of Art Rowanberry, and Wendell Berry, and my grandparents and great-grandparents, and my nephews and nieces and the centuries that stretch behind and before that assemblage.

Lest I leave you for a week--next week seeming unlikely to yield time for writing--on too somber a note, I'll close with a couple of lines from a column that Charles Portis wrote for the Arkansas Gazette in 1959, collected in Escape Velocity: A Charle Portis Miscellany:

There were Presbyterians, Methodists, and a sprinkling of Baptists at these get-togethers we attended, and when it came time to eat the honor of returning thanks usually fell to the windiest old man there.

He would send a long, thunderous blessing rambling up to the skies, and you would have thought that we had all just been delivered from the fiery furnace, instead of sitting down to eat some sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. And for those of you outside God's U.S. of A., who perhaps have never had a chance to enjoy sweet potatoes baked with marshmallows, drop me an e-mail and I'll gladly send a recipe. That shit is divine.

Chasers

Two very quick addenda to Friday's post about hangovers and drinking. The first one comes from A Place in Time, Wendell Berry's wonderful new collection of stories about the Port William Membership, whose lives and histories he's beeån chronicling for decades now. It's found in "A Burden," which tells of Uncle Peach, a well-meaning ne'er-do-well and drunk:

Oe afternoon Burley Coulter came upon Uncle Peach in front of a roadhouse down by Hargrave. Uncle Peach had been drinking evidently a lot of whiskey and also eating evidently a lot of pickled food from the bar. He had just finished vomiting upon the body of a dead cat, at which he was now gazing in great asotnishment.

"Well, what's the matter, old Peach?"

"Why, Burley," Uncle Peach said. "I remember them pigs' feet and that baloney, but I got no recollection whatsoever of that cat."

That one's gross; the next one's horrible. It comes from Stefan Kiesbye's strange and satisfying little book of horrible stories (think Grimm's Fairy Tales crossed with a more sordid Gashleycrumb Tinies) Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone:

He drank until his sweat turned pink.

And with that, well, the coffee is brewing and Monday's tired of waiting.

"We inherited from him early his abounding sense of the possibilities of the countryside."

In response to my post last week about the shared desire of Thomas Hardy and Wendell Berry to preserve rapidly disappearing rural ways of life, Frank Wilson of Books, Inq. commented,

The idealization of country life seems to be about as old as literature. But it is the work of writers, who have a tendency to airbrush out the grinding poverty and back-breaking labor that went with pastoral scenes. Which is not to say that I do not find myself susceptible to such idealization.

It's a sensible response to a post in which I confessed to finding Berry's and Hardy's visions of rural life seductive, but fairness to both authors dictates that I make clear that they actually spend a lot of time chronicling the hard work necessitated by such a life. In fact, they're two of the best writers about work, period, that I know.

At the same time, however, neither man denies the pleasure to be had in good company while you're working with your hands. It's a feeling I know from the work I did as a boy on farms, and as a young man in food service and the retail trade: when you're performing straightforward manual tasks, your mind--and your conversation--can roam free in a way that even the best office life can't replicate.

Tess offers some great examples of both aspects of manual labor. While Tess find little but happiness--despite the early hours and tiring work--at the dairy where she begins her working life, at the farm where she labors later she finds toil at its most draining. The following scene is a good example: Tess and her fellow laborers are working with the itinerant owner of a rudimentary steam-powered threshing machine hired by the farmer. Because the machine's time is precious, the farmer forces them to take advantage of the full moon and keep working through the night until the hayrick has been completely threshed. Night wears on:

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the great upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a yellow river running up-hill, and spouting out on the top of the rick.

The threshing concludes in a scene that can only be horrifying to our modern eyes, but was simply an accepted part of the job in nineteenth-century Dorset: the hubbub that ensues when the work reveals the layer of live rats at the bottom of the hayrick.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began. The creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick till they were all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered from their last refuge they ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud shriek from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her companions that one of the rats had invaded her person--a terror which the rest of the womeon had guarded against by various schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation. The rat was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs, masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last sheaf; the drum slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from the machine to the ground.

Writing about farm life as lived nearly a century later, Wendell Berry, too, conveys both its responsibilities and rewards. The former is summed up nicely in this paragraph from the funny and moving story "Never Send a Boy to Do a Man's Work":

Carter Keith was a good father. He kept Athey with him as much as his work and, later, Athey's schooling would alow. The Keith place was always asire with work in those days. Everybody on the place would be up and the men and boys at the barns while the stars still shone, and at work by first light. Carter Keith followed the rules that he handed on to his son: He made use of all the daylight he had and would ask no man to do anythign that he would not do himself. His tenants and hands knew this and so respected him, and they worked hard.

While these passages from "Where Did They Go?" offer a small glimpse of the pleasures of manual labor in a crew:

Though talking put Leaf to extreme effort, tightening the cords of his neck, when he sang his voice came sweet and free. To hear him stop talking, which he seldom did, and start to sing "The Wabash Cannonball or "Footprints in the Snow" always seemed a sort of miracle to me, as if a groundhog had suddenly soared into the air like a swallow. . . . It was pretty work when you had time to think about it, and weren't too tired to care. We drew the white-stemmed, green-leafed plants out of the moist ground of the beds, and laid them neatly in bushel baskets and old washtubs. R. T. hauled them to the patch where the setter crew spaced them out in the long rows. They would wilt in the heat that day, but by the next morning or the next, they would be stickign up again, pert and green and orderly, in the dew-darkened ground. Each night when we quit, Jake would say to me, fairly singing: "We're getting it done, Andy boy! We're leaving it behind!"

And that "leaving it behind," I can tell you from walking beans as a teenager, is one of the best feelings in the world.

Thomas Hardy and Wendell Berry

{Photos of Dorsetshire by rocketlass.}

When I went to shelve Tess of the D'Urbervilles tonight I realized that I first needed to add one more post to the string inspired by my recent re-reading of this most heartfelt of Thomas Hardy's novels.

I wrote a bit already about Hardy's tinkering with the text between the novel's first appearance in 1891 in the Graphic and its inclusion in the Wessex edition of his works in 1912. The most obvious and important changes Hardy introduced were to the relationship between Tess and Alec, but another set of alterations seems worth noting, particularly for a reader coming to the book more than a century later. As David Skilton, editor of the 1978 Penguin Classics edition, explains,

On the whole there is an increase in dialect and colloquialism in the dialogue between the 1891 and 1912. . . . The spoken language is generally rather neater, more economical, and less "literary" in the later version.

The increased employment of dialect, alongside the occasional added reference to some old country practice--such as Angel Clare's wearing of a cabbage leaf under his hat to keep cool, which only appears in the 1912 edition--suggests that Hardy revised with an eye towards preserving details of a way of life that, in the decades since Tess's first publication, had almost entirely disappeared.

Even at the time of writing, Hardy was aware that the old country ways, having held from time immemorial, were slipping away, obsolescent in the face of the machine age. Late in the novel Hardy writes of the increasing hubbub of Old Lady-Day, when farm laborers who want to change situations moved to their new homes:

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here. When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field-folk around Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch.

At the same time, Hardy explains, the villages were also being depopulated, their non-farm residents--carpenters, smiths, and other skilled workers--were being forced out; when their leaseholds expired, which often happened on the death of the head of the family, their cottages were torn down, the land beneath them going under the plow. As Hardy explains,

These families, who had formed the backbone of village life in the past, who were the depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as "the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns," being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.

That passage, written in close to a pure editorial voice, reminds me of Wendell Berry, who takes on the same mission of preservation in his novels. Berry draws on more than a century of unbroken chains of story and memory to recall rural life as it was lived in the years just before and after World War II, when the largely self-contained, pre-petroleum economy still held sway in the more remote hill farms of Kentucky. Berry's belief in that mostly lost way of life as more sustainable, human, and fulfilling than our contemporary industrial culture is implicit in all his fiction, echoed in the relationships of characters to one another and to the land, and in his emphasis on the importance of stewardship in all our interactions.

Berry makes those points explicit in his non-fiction, as in this passage from his essay "People, Land, and Community," collectd in The Art of the Commonplace:

People are joined to the land by work. Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information--so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers--because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious--that a culture must either be shapely and saving or shapleless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantitites, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit its people. And then instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.

It was only when I read Wendell Berry, more than a decade after I left my rural birthplace for Chicago, that I understood how my hometown, like the smaller farming communities around it, had entered upon the decline that, by the time I left, had trimmed its population and largely shuttered its downtown. Berry's accounts, in fiction and nonfiction, showed me what those towns had been as recently as a generation ago, and it made me ache for their loss in a way I never had when I lived there.

The city is my home, and I love it far too much to ever want to leave it, but through Berry's eyes I finally saw what a small town could be even now, if propelled by a dynamic, decidedly local economy. It's a seductive vision, and one that I think Thomas Hardy would recognize and approve.

Sunday Haiku

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Last night as I bicycled down Damen Avenue, I was surprised by the honking of geese overhead, long after they should have been bedded down for the night. By the time we got to our destination, I was working on this haiku:

Geese in formation
Honk to announce September
Where did summer go?

Then there's this version, which adds what I noticed on my run in the park this afternoon:

Geese in formation
And leaves crunching underfoot:
September has come.

All of which reminds me of Wendell Berry--whose unwavering attention to the changes on the land is a model for us all--and in particular of this stanza, from the 1991 installment of his Sabbath poems,collected in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998):

Autumn ripens the corn.
You pick the yellow ears,
Carry them from the field,
Rich, satisfying loads.
The garden's final yield
Now harvested, the ground
Worked and manured, prepared
For spring, put out of mind,
You must saw, split, bring in,
And store your winter wood.
And thus the year comes round.

Wendell Berry, part three

Part one is here, and part two is here.

Loss is the primary driving force behind Berry’s newest look at Port William, the very brief Andy Catlett: Early Travels, which tells of two days in the life of 9-year-old Andy Catlett, who has over the years served as Berry’s stand-in in his fiction. As 1943 turns to 1944, Andy spends a day with each of his sets of grandparents, helping with farm chores, visiting with neighbor kids, and enjoying the freedom of a solitary walk to town. He reads the tales of King Arthur, eats his grandmother’s biscuits, and tears up when he can’t figure out what to say to a friend of the family whose nephew has been lost in the war. Mostly, though, he just enjoys the implicit freedom of a two-day pass to his grandparents’ houses, and we, through the eyes of an older, 70-something Andy, enjoy it with him.

Like kids do, Andy generally takes the people around him for granted. But as those of us who’ve read A Place on Earth realize, much of what Andy is telling us about will be gone soon, much of it with astonishing speed, and that perspective, represented by the older Andy, imbues the story with both sadness and a sense of forever-lost opportunity. “By now,” he says, “of all the people I have been remembering from those days in Port William, I alone am still alive. I am, as Maze Tickburn used to say, the onliest one.” The book is shot through with the lament, so pervasive as to almost be a refrain, “Why did I not ask them about it when I had the chance?” As much as anyone writing, Berry makes clear the tremendous cost of every single death: the world thus lost to us is unrecoverable, and the older the person who's died, the more precious and full was the world that has been lost.

But for all that, it is not a depressing book, or even a particularly sad one. Like Proust or Anthony Powell or any number of other authors, Berry has at least partially succeeded in his aim: he has stored up some of the flavor of those times, the reality of those people, so we all can know and understand them. Much is lost, but the beauty of what has been preserved, what has been shored up against loss, keeps the sadness in check--a component of memory, yes, but by no means its entirety. As Andy Catlett notes, late in the book:

We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost .It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.

At an age when many people are retired—but when, for example, many of Berry’s characters, too infirm to work, continue to traipse out to the field each day simply to be around and feel a part of the work and companionship that for so many years defined them—Berry is continuing to put the finishing touches on his overall masterpiece. I look forward to him continuing to tell me more about the Port William Membership; I’m sure there are some stories there I haven’t heard yet, and I don’t want it to be for lack of asking.

Wendell Berry, part two

Part one is here.

When someone is writing about a mostly lost way of life that he clearly loved, there is of course a tremendous danger of his falling victim to the falsifications of nostalgia, but Berry is far too clear-eyed to pretend that life when he was young was perfect—in part, I think, because he did appreciate that way of life so much that to be dishonest about it would be a betrayal. He writes well of the difficulty of manual labor and the precariousness of farming, and of the complications inherent to longstanding family and neighborly relations. Even more important, given that he’s writing about mid-twentieth-century Kentucky, is that he deals head-on with the issue of race. When his white characters interact with his black characters (who are usually working for them), Berry lets the issue of race remain complicated, refusing any easy answers, be they condemnation or absolution. The problem of race, and the complicity of those he's loved in its evils, gnaws at him as a storyteller, and he lets it gnaw similarly at his characters, forever unresolved.

That sort of honesty is also what allows Berry to avoid turning his fiction into polemic: by remaining true to the characters themselves rather than to ideas, he allows both the characters and the ideas they largely embody their full power. He’s not always completely successful. A whiff of polemic hampers portions of the otherwise masterly Jayber Crow (2000), and in the recent Hannah Coulter (2004) an effort to incorporate a reading of E. B. Sledge’s devastating memoir of the Pacific campaign in World War II (prompted, presumably, by anger over the Iraq war, underway as Berry was writing and to which he was an early, strident, opposing voice) threatens to derail an otherwise excellent look at a previously little-known character. But those are rare slips; for the most part, Berry is simply telling stories about believable people living a way of life he is just old enough to have seen firsthand and that he, in one way or another, misses every single day.

This post about Berry doesn't really break into equally sized chunks, so today's a short one. More tomorrow.

Wendell Berry, part one

About fifteen years ago, wanting tools for thinking about alternatives to contemporary consumption-crazy capitalism, I read E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973). In certain circles, it has the status of a classic, but I found it an almost complete disappointment. Schumacher is thoroughly anti-modern, suspicious of technology and capitalism, and throughout the book he rails against the excesses of industrial production. But his argument is almost entirely a negative one: he wants to destroy our current economy and the way of life it creates and enables, but he offers no compelling alternative vision. Small Is Beautiful left me with the impression that Schumacher simply liked the (mostly imaginary) old days—maybe even medieval times—better than today, but that, whatever our doubts about contemporary life, there was no reason for the rest of us to follow him.

Years later, I discovered Wendell Berry, who, while sharing a lot of Schumacher’s suspicions of modernity, unlike Schumacher succeeds in presenting a positive alternative vision. For nearly forty years, in stories, novels, poems, and essays, he has both detailed the problems with industrial life and demonstrated the many benefits—and even the necessity of—alternatives. He is, to use Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, a hedgehog, having one big idea: that a local economy, tied to a healthy stewardship of the land and a sense of responsibility towards it and one’s family and neighbors, is the only economy that is sustainable over the long term. The land, in Berry’s mind, is given to us in trust, handed from one generation to the next, and it is the job of every generation to tend it well, repair damage that has been done, and pass it on healthier than it was when we received it. If we do that, argues Berry, we will have healthy land, strong communities, and successful families.

Berry’s essays are an always interesting combination of agrarian thought and personal reflection, making use of personal experience to illustrate larger points about community and land use and drawing the essential links between environmentalism and politics. They’ve taught me a lot about my own small-town background, explaining how the rapid post-World War II industrialization and the subsequent widespread adoption of automobiles and industrial farming techniques led to the current state of rural population loss and environmental degradation. They’re also a great starting point for anyone questioning, in particular, the way we currently raise and distribute our food in the West, and in fact they were a major source for Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which I wrote about here).

The ideas Berry lays out in his essays also underlie his fiction, where they are explored through the lives of the interlocking families of the small Kentucky hill town of Port William. Since 1960 Berry has written seven novels and two dozen stories about what he calls the Port William Membership, from Reconstruction to the present day. Much of the large cast and many of the major events in the life of the town are presented in A Place on Earth (1967), which takes place in 1943 and 1944, as World War II begins to make its effects shown, though no one in the town yet realizes how extensive and long-lasting those effects will be, or that the result will be the loss of a long-sustained agrarian way of life. In subsequent novels and stories, Berry draws attention to different groups of characters and different periods, showing us alternative views of the same stories, earlier or later incidents in the lives of people we have already come to know well through A Place on Earth.

Berry's books are full of manual labor and the constant conversation that accompanies it, of families and marriages and deaths, of surprises and violence, of tired old jokes and sudden seriousness. They’re vastly entertaining, as captivating as a soap opera, and, as novel adds to novel, each fleshing out a different portion of the overall story whose contours Berry limned in A Place on Earth, the breadth and sweep of the narrative becomes breathtaking.

More tomorrow.

It's a helluva town.

I'm in New York this week for work, so my reading is on the subway instead of the L. Some New York notes:

1) I started my trip, on the plane, with the least New York book I had handy, Wendell Berry's new novella, Andy Catlett (2006). Berry is a man of the country and the farm, unimpressed by cities, though he has lived in them at times, and Andy Catlett is in part a lament of everything that I can hear right now through my hotel window, the sounds of post-War America--fueled by petroleum, always on the go, mind always split between here and there, now and the future. It's an elegiac book, despite being written about a nine-year-old boy, and in picking it to bring, I guessed right: its slow cadences put me in the right mood for entering the city.

2) But once I got to my hotel, the Hudson, I had no choice but to leap with both feet into the future that to Berry is of such uncertain value, for the Hudson resembles nothing so much as a vision of tomorrow dreamed up by Wong Kar Wei and Haruki Murakami, with the addition of at least a dollop of Eurotrash. So back to Murakami I went, this time to Norwegian Wood (1987, translated into English in 2000).

And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Norwegian Wood is haunted by a similar sense of loss to that which pervades Andy Catlett. A thirty-seven-year-old man looks back, from 1987, on a love of his 1960s youth:

Each time [that memory] appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. . . . Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

For all that Murakami's books get discussed as weird pageants of contemporary life, icons of postmodernism, the ones I've read have all featured narrators driven by loss, alienated from their past or from the world by people they can't have back, decisions they can't unmake, times they can't recapture. There is a similarity in tone between Murakami and Berry, or Murakami and Anthony Powell, or Proust, that I never expected when I first opened his novels.

3) For weeks, I've been trying to remember the name of a contemporary British author, whose multi-volume family saga has been reviewed favorably, and whose prose style seemed like one I would appreciate. Take this exchange, for example:

"Imagine wanting to talk to someone on the phone," said Eleanor. "I dread it."

"Youth," said Nicholas tolerantly.

"I dreaded it even more in my youth, if that's possible."

Wanting to read this unknown author's collected novels, and knowing what its spine looked like, I'd even gone so far as to quickly look over all the fiction shelves at 57th Street Books in an attempt to circumvent my faulty memory, but to no avail. Then last night, while waiting to meet some friends, I wandered into Three Lives and Company on 10th Street and there it was, stacked high on the front table of staff favorites: Edward St. Aubyn's Some Hope (2003).

When fate gives you such clear instructions to buy a book, you are required to do so, fidelity to your local bookstore and lack of space in your luggage be damned.

4) As a longtime Joseph Mitchell fan, I talked the aforementioned friends into visiting McSorley's Old Ale House last night, and I was pleased that it was all I could have hoped for, abjuring modernity while somehow avoiding the deadly taints of kitsch or irony. The urinals alone--deep, tall, and majestic--made me feel young and insignificant, part of a lesser, fallen generation. We can't even pee like they used to pee.

Then we proceeded to irk our waiter with our frequent indecision in the face of his queries. It was hard to fault him: after all, one's only choices are light or dark, have another round or don't. And again I felt a failure. Joseph Mitchell would have had no trouble deciding. William Maxwell would have had no trouble deciding. Hell, had they allowed women back then, Dorothy Parker would have had no trouble deciding.

A couple of times, our waiter simply decided for us, always in the affirmative, always for the dark, and he was right, of course. We drank what was put in front of us and talked, of, among other topics, baseball, on which subject we were not the only patrons dwelling on this mid-December night. Imagining people talking of Ruth and DiMaggio in their day, just as we talked of Pettite and Giambi, made me feel a bit better about our efforts as patrons.

But my confidence received its largest boost when, as we made our thanks and headed for the door, the waiter chucked me on the elbow and said, "That's a nice suit."

Had I had my proper hat, I would have tipped it to Joseph Mitchell as I left.

Thanksgiving

From Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)

In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward L. Biller. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role:

A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.

My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting technique—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgirms to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing a bountiful harvest. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving.
. . . .
The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.

Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars agree. . . . Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by European colonists for two centuries. Squanto’s teachings, [colonist Edward] Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of Indian corn”—the difference between success and starvation.

Winslow didn’t know that fish fetilizer may not have been an age-old Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all. So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the idea from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in effect had to escape twice—once from Spain, where his captors initially sold him into slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.

Skipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s life is understandable in a textbook with limited space. But the omission is symptomatic of the complete failure to understand Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off [their enemies] the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.

From Penelope Lively’s Making It Up (2005)

Most Americans know who they are, to a greater or lesser degree. Moreover, they signal myriad identities; they define the nation. They are Greek-American or Italian-American or Latino or black, they propose China, Japan, the Philippines—they echo the globe. They are a walking, talking mnemonic system, remembering arrivals and survivals, the Atlantic passage, the trek west, settlement and dispersal, calamity and prosperity, whispering still of the other place that is hidden in each person—the shtetls of Russia, Poland, Lithuania, the fishing villages and the farms, the fetid slums of cities, the plantations and the slave quarters. She and Ben had a friend called Mary Dixon, as Anglo-Saxon a name as you could find, but Mary herself was a figure from Greek tragedy, she was Electra, she was Clytemnestra, she was dark, dark, with great Byzantine eyes and rich black hair. And yes, indeed, Mary’s great-grandfather arrived at Staten Island from Piraeus, with extended family and not a word of English, so that the recording clerk, defeated by the accent and the names, put down Mary’s father simply as Dick’s son, to have done with it. And Dixon the family became and remained, but Mary’s face said otherwise.

From Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998)

1979: X

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.

And, as we enter this Thanksgiving holiday, which I hope you all will enjoy with friends, family, and wonderful home-cooked food, one last note. It’s a bit of dialogue from Penelope Lively’s Making It Up; you’ll know immediately if you’re one of those who might be well-served by recalling it this weekend:

People are not responsible for their relatives.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

Food

I have Sandy and Sarah to thank for pointing me to the best book I read during my baseball-induced blog hiatus. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, through the sometimes strained conceit of tracing four specific meals back to their source materials, is a fascinating exploration of the current state of our production of—and relationship to—food. Coming from a farm background, and being both a vegetarian and a subscriber to the produce of a nearby community-supported farm, I knew a little bit about the subject going into the book. I know that our contemporary food system is built on a willful blindness about the materials and methods that bring us our meals. I know that most American eat in ways that are bad for them and their planet, out of a combination of ignorance, busy-ness, complacency, and lack of opportunity. I know that, like many other aspects of our resource use as a culture, our current approach to food is likely to be unsustainable. And I know that I haven’t always had this knowledge, despite my background and the amount of cooking I’ve done since I became an adult; I distinctly remember being stopped cold by Wendell Berry’s reminder that we can never be any healthier than the land from which we draw our sustenance.

But despite that knowledge, Pollan’s relentless questioning, his dogged working backwards through link after link in the food supply chain, taught me a lot about aspects of our food culture that I knew little about. Take the huge fields of corn that blanket the Midwest. Pollan’s opening chapter clearly and carefully explains how, in part because of various subsidies and government programs, American agriculture after World War II began growing a tremendous surplus of corn every year. That corn has ended up in every part of our food system, with often terrible, unanticipated results. Corn syrup replaces sugar in soft drinks; because corn syrup is so cheap, the soft drinks get larger (rather than getting cheaper); people drink more calories of soft drinks; people get diabetes. That’s a simplified version, of course, leaving out many mitigating and complicating factors (which Pollan does not neglect), but when you see similarly malignant patterns in the realms of livestock, chemical fertilizers and herbicides, crop rotations, and more, the overall effect is powerful.

That chapter, and subsequent ones on large-scale organic farming (which has its own grave problems) are both fantastic. But the highlight of the book is when Pollan visits a small-scale farm in Virginia, where grasslands, chickens, hogs, and cattle interact in layers and loops of dizzying complexity to create an ecological system in careful balance, one requiring very, very few external inputs beyond sunlight, rainfall, and manual labor. The farmer, evangelical about his type of farming to the point where I think he’d probably be annoying as a relative or friend, is adamant that this is the way forward: producing and selling locally, keeping a close connection to the land and therefore (as Wendell Berry would certainly agree) fully understanding of the responsibility the farmer has to the land. At first, Pollan is confused that the farmer won’t fedex him a steak; by the end of his visit, he feels like a fool for having asked.

The closing section, on hunting (pigs) and gathering (fungi), isn’t t anywhere near as interesting. And while I love the process of cooking, I’m not actually that interested in reading about food itself, so the descriptions of meals that crop up here and there in The Omnivore’s Dilemma were mostly skippable. But it’s still a great book, and the one I’m most likely to buy as a Christmas gift for more than one person this year. It’s also the gift most likely to spark lively discussion. Pollan, after all, raises far more questions than he answers—he ‘s too smart not to acknowledge that every possible solution to our current situation has its own limitations and problems. But I’ll be very surprised if you can read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and keep it out of your thoughts the next time you sit down to a meal with the person you gave the book to, or the next time you go to the grocery store.

After all, asparagus in January? Apple cider in March? Twinkies, ever? Clearly there’s something wrong here, but how wrong, and how can we make it right? That’s a Thanksgiving dinner conversation if I’ve ever heard one!

Life stories

I spent two days flying last week, and as I read Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), I remembered why I like to pack biographies when I travel. With nothing to distract me except the occasional, accidental sight of Martin Lawrence parading around in a dress on the screen above me, I can fully sink into the details of a life. Immersed for hours, uninterrupted by work or the need to listen for my L stop, I’m able to fully enter the subject’s world. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, peripheral as they may be, become firmly placed; I don’t have to consult the index to remind myself of who’s who. For a while, I nearly live the life I read.

I had already been thinking about completed lives, and what remains of a life. Even the quietest of us leaves a lot behind—stories, letters, legal records, collections—and a good biographer can fashion those elements into a coherent narrative of a whole person. Some biographies, like Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys (2002) (the best biography I’ve read), reveal a subject livelier, wiser, and more likable than we expected; others, like A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy (1986), lead us—and the author—from admiration to astonished disgust. Regardless, a person’s life is rebuilt, assembled from scattered pieces and presented anew, giving us here the perspective of a close friend, there that of a secret diary, and elsewhere that of history. An anecdote gives a glimpse of a moment in time, and someone forever gone is returned. It’s hard to imagine a greater honor.

But most of us are never the subject of biographies. Our letters remain unread by anyone but the recipient, our diaries (unless we put them on the Internet) gather dust, and our secrets, successes, and failures remain, as we would surely prefer, our own. What lingers after us are the stories people remember and retell, the stories they repeat to each other over the years, and maybe, if we’re lucky, pass down to their children and grandchildren. For the promise that such stories would live on, Achilles was willing to sacrifice his life. Few of us are as needy as Achilles; we don't have to sacrifice our lives. We just have to live them.

So I learn that Stacey’s grandmother, on discovering that a young Stacey had managed to climb onto the roof of the garage, admonished her, not to get down, but to wear shoes up there, because the roof was dirty. And that, when asked about the internment camps that she and other Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed to in the early years of World War II, she spoke not about the deprivation, but of the people she met there and the crafts they made. And that she darned Stacey's father's socks, and she turned his collars, so that he assumed for years that everyone practiced such economies.

Or I remember that I’ll have to tell my nephew about my Great-Grandpa Colonel, an auctioneer, born late in the nineteenth century, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, but who, living his whole life in Kansas, experienced a very different twentieth century. I've been told that once he bought a new shed at an auction and, knowing that Great-Grandma Inez would not agree that they needed a second shed, attempted to hide it by placing it behind the first shed. The ploy failed. When my father first met him, on an unbearably humid Kansas night in the late 1960s, Colonel offered him ice cream, then revealed a reach-down freezer holding a dozen different flavors. My father knew from that point that he and Colonel would get along just fine. And I remember that into his early nineties Colonel, an inattentive but enthusiastic driver, delivered meals-on-wheels to housebound old folks.

Then there was my Great-Grandmother Marie. Elegant, patrician, and a bit imperious, she never seemed quite certain about children, though she was always kind to us great-grandkids. Her daughter, my Great-Aunt Mary, had a labrador retriever named Gator, who had a pet rock that he carried in his mouth. He removed it only to eat, and if it somehow went missing, the whole household was enlisted in a careful search. Years of carrying the rock wore the teeth on the right side of Gator's mouth to nubs.

And thus we keep our past and its people with us. Near the end of Wendell Berry’s elegiac novel Jayber Crow (2000) Jayber, who, being younger than most of his friend and acquaintances, has outlived most of them, thinks

I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn’t know I had ever thought. “Forty years” or “Fifty years” or “Sixty years,” I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. one by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cots. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

But the rest of us remain, and we speak of our friends.