On February 5 and 6 2019, Marilynne Robinson delivered the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lecture on American Civilization and Government entitled “Liberalism and American Tradition” at the New York Public Library in which she investigates the roots of liberal thought in America. Before I lose track of them, here is the library’s introduction followed by the embedded lectures.
Marilynne Robinson is one of the most celebrated American writers—she won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was awarded a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, …She recently delivered the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures on American Civilization and Government lecture on American Civilization and Government titled “Liberalism and American Tradition,” which traces the origins of liberalism. The biennial lecture series is presented by the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at NYPL.
…Well, the first thing I can say relates to the coincidental reading of Salvage the Bones not long after committing myself to giving William Faulkner a “go” – again, after many years. I will try to expand my thoughts about him another time – a daunting prospect! – but here I will just say the book I first turned to was “As I Lay Dying”. In terms of narrative, if one were to think of that novel as a sort of grotesque road trip, then from what I know of Sing, Unburied, Sing, it is with this more recent novel that comparisons are suggested; sharing not only the road, but also a bizarre choir of alternating narrative voices. But maybe because my reading of “As I Lay Dying” is fresh, and thinking about the respective cast of characters, I discern in Salvage the Bones also the ghost of William Faulkner hovering over the Batiste family and the “Pit” down there on the Gulf coast that is their home.
Consider for instance, two young pregnant girls, two youngest brothers of a certain age (do I imagine similarities in their mimic, their speech, emotional distress), a pair of youths both with “crushes” on animals – pit-bull and horse, mothers dying and dead but with spirits indomitable, fathers at once dominating and apathetic, familial loyalties written in a code only to be understood by the initiated. I couldn’t help but relate the Batiste family’s confused and instinctive responses to the rising waters initiated by hurricane Katrina to Faulkner’s Bundrens and their chaotic attempts to cross a flooding river. Both a matter of keeping one’s head above the water – actually and metaphorically.
And then there is this certain mood to Ward’s writing that I find difficult to define, but it is something perhaps related to the “South”, a mythical quality of place and beyond place, that she shares with Faulkner.
Hurricane Katrina formed on August 23, 2005, and in less than a week grew from a tropical depression into a category 4 hurricane. When Katrina made landfall on August 29 near New Orleans on the U.S. Gulf Coast, it brought widespread devastation and flooding with it. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Christine McCabe and Kenny Chmielewski
Then there is “Katrina”. As fundamental as she has now become to the narrative of the Gulf states, her legend too lives way beyond the American shores. For many, her brief, devastating life – those few days in August, 2005 – not much more than the days told in Salvage the Bones, exposed – surprisingly for some, not so for others – the deep fractures traversing the most powerful nation on earth; laid bare the inherent racism, the disparities of wealth and all that follows in terms of health, welfare, education, jobs, and the tenuous fabric of a society woven out of a history as cruel, crueler, than the mythical beauty of the geography.
Told in the voice of the fifteen year old Esch, Salvage the Bones is compact in place, a fictional backwater near the Mississippi Gulf coast with the daunting name of Bois Sauvage, and resolutely chronological, with the past only anecdotally revisited in Esch’s thoughts to then be made present (the past is never dead, it is not even past – more Faulkner!) and spanning just a twelve day period from the certainty of her pregnancy and culminating in the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the day after.
The reader is drawn into Esch’s world of poverty and disrepair, of loyalties tested every day, and wonders at the fortitude displayed by her family in their constant battle to survive on not much at all, and witnesses friendships that break – with Manny; he responsible but not willing to take responsibility, and those that endure – like Big Henry; with a heart even bigger than his stature. And just as powerful is Esch’s remarkable inner life that she shares (with us); one that has evolved through real hardship and a rich, uncompromising imagination. And Esch is the mother (to be) that is still there when the others have gone quiet – Medea, Katrina, China. There are passages and scenes that repulse and disturb, but that ultimately blend with the heroic to create a most fabulous tableau.
Oak tree landscape in DeLisle, Miss., Jesmyn Ward’s home town from which Bois Sauvage is inspired. Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America
Jesmyn Ward weaves her story with the virtuosity that comes only with knowledge – and a good portion of love. Yes, she was there, she was really there – a place called DeLisle – and her family survived as the fictional Batiste family does too, but it is not only that singular experience of “Katrina”, she knows intimately this cruel, beautiful neck of the woods, she knows her characters. This place and these people – they are hers, and she gives them dignity. Community.
I loved this book. I loved the things it made me think about. And I haven’t finished – thinking – nor have I mentioned Medea who plays too a role amongst the extraordinary cast of “mothers”, so more is yet to come.
Sometimes a good read comes one’s way through a “having to …” (for one reason or another). And so it was when Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones was recently set for discussion at a local book club I attend here in Germany. Irrespective of the National Book Award in 2011, I missed this novel these some years now gone (gone where?!), and in fact Ward has only really come to my attention in much more recent times with news of her third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing which has been extensively reviewed (and in 2017 won for Ward again the National Book Award!), and I should say has also has not yet been read by me. As is the way, her previous works were often brought up in medial appraisals of this latter work, so generally speaking I knew the what and when of Salvage the Bones. (And I should say William Faulkner seemed also to be often mentioned by reviewers – more on this later.)
In preparation for the reading, I went to the internet to see what I could find (this PBS video for instance or a piece written for an August, 2018 Time special on the American South) – the who and what and when of Jesmyn Ward – and as a result, I must say before I had even started reading I was quite captured by her presence; her person. Every fiction needs a narrative and every person has one, but with the latter as with the former some are just a little more compelling than others. It seems to me, Ward has lived and lives one such – for better or worse she may well add. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing overly demonstrative or theatrical about her, nothing, rather one senses a decency, a generosity of spirit, and an integrity that is rare in days of endless posturing. I very much wanted to discover whether she could also write a “life”, so to speak; translate the personal world she inhabits and its concerns into a fictional narrative. And, it is not just the reviewers, Jesmyn Ward herself mentions Faulkner – a lot!
And so I read Salvage the Bones, and was certainly not disappointed. Some could quibble, but I will not. It is not perfect. It is not Faulkner. (And, by the way, nor is he – perfect, that is.) She is not he, so how could it be. Her debt to him though is obvious. What would he say? That he, a white man of the South, of the early, middle 20th century, he of the segregated, racist South should give a voice to an African-American woman in the early decades of the 21st century – one firmly rooted in a contemporary Mississippi that may be desegregated formally but bearing still the scars of its past. Or is it more a voice shared – in and somehow beyond time and person and even race? And what can I say, as one not of the South, foreign to this very particular part of America, its norms and its codes? … (to be continued)
More for future reference than anything else – given that I usually have a year (or two, or three …) lag, The Guardianhas published a list of their best (& reviewed) for the year to date.
A few of the publications I have been aware of, for example from The Guardian’s must-reads from year’s beginning here , like for instance the new books from Ali Smith, Tana French and Toni Morrison, but there are some that are new to me. That part of me attracted to myth, either in narrative form or as scholarly excursus respectful of the “lay” intelligence, takes particular heed of Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Shipswhich gives the women of Homer’s Iliad their very own voice (I know women writers dabbling where they don’t belong is being done a lot of late, but we do have two or three thousand years to catch up on!). And for a different sort of myth, if you will: A History of the Bible: the Book and its Faiths by Oxford professor and Anglican priest John Barton sounds to me like an intellectually stimulating and original work, without an agenda beyond putting fundamental interpretation of all persuasion in its place and the joyful exposition of all the splendours of a literary reading-that’s what I understand from their review anyway.
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel, pub. Harper & Collins, March 5 2020.
As one of those many waiting – at first patiently, and for a little while now not so – I note here the really excellent news of the forthcoming publication, in March 2020, of Hilary Mantel’s concluding book to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
Could it be, I should return for another read of the preceding books – Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies? I think so – there is time enough and Mantel’s Cromwell is so powerful, so agonisingly real I have to make reacquaintance with him and his journey so far before accompanying him to the demise he knows he deserves.
The English book club I frequent in the middle of Germany somewhere, will be reading Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones after Easter. Following is a little video from The New York Times in 2013 after the publication of another work Men We Reaped, a memoir and, if you will, a real life counter-point to her fiction.
Still on Julian Barnes, another of his novels that I really like is Noise of Time (2017), a literary imagining of sorts of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Musically I will almost certainly never know Shostakovich, but Barnes’s fine character study revealed to me a man tormented by the inability to reconcile the virtuosity and grandeur of an interior personae with the smallness of the exterior life as lived, or vice versa. And one asks and must answer each for oneself: which was the real “Shostakovich” here anyway? And how great and how small can a man be? And will only time tell?
At the time of publication, along with some lauded reviews, there were a number of more critical pieces focusing on the controversial place of Dmitri Shostakovich in the history of 20th century music; some, whilst accepting Julian Barnes’s use of a real historical figure as a useful device in fictional narrative, seem to suggest that he has deliberately sought to secure Shostakovich’s legacy, not only as an artist but in a moral sense. One example is this by the musicologist, Richard Taruskin. Taruskin sees the problematic starting in fact with the very use of the composer’s real name, and an inherent confusion in differentiating between fact and fiction. This may be a valid enough criticism, though it rather underestimates the sophistication of the modern discerning reader, but he extends his negative appraisal by interpreting the novel as an attempt by Barnes to place the (historical) composer in the role of victim rather than identifying him as the opportunist he surely was. In my opinion, this is a very superficial interpretation. My reading is of the portrayal of a man, and an artist, living under totalitarianism, who, yes, made a deliberate choice to kowtow to the regime, but also had to live with the consequence of doing so; including a tainted reputation in the wider world and feeble attempts to redeem himself at least for posterity, and all of this shaded by an ever pervasive sense of guilt. Nor do I see that Barnes in any way diminishes the greater sacrifices made by others – real people and braver people; sometimes even greater artists.
Barnes’s third person narrative, told in the form of interior monologues, is of course highly subjective and therefore biased, even egocentric, but always to be discerned is a tormented, not very courageous man forever afraid of impending denunciation; mitigated only by his retreat to silence and irony and passive cooperation. I accepted the “story” – “his” story and “his” truth; the real Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich remains as elusive to me as is his music (there is something to be said for reading from a point of ignorance), and that in my opinion doesn’t detract from the literary merit of Barnes’s novel. But perhaps that is because I came to the book without looking for a confirmation of the historical person and without knowledge of the “Shostakovich Wars” played out by experts and related others only in the colours of the keys of a piano.
