Toni Morrison died on Monday. Another of those I discovered later than many – but what is late but the proverbial better than the never to have. I don’t believe she wrote her stories for me nor was she speaking to me, but I listened in just the same, and she stretched my intellect and took my imagination to places I thought unknown, and found places that were always there – a sameness to be shared. Her wonderful essays made me think about things I may never have thought about, and remember what I thought was best forgot.
Tributes are everywhere to be found, from the famous and not so, through all races (a categorisation that Morrison denied and embraced with rage and love in equal measure) and places, genders and generations. And because it is the younger amongst us that will take her the farthest in the passing of time –here is the young Nigerian writer, Chigozie Obioma, in The Guardian, and because I have spent so much time of late with her (her words at least) I quote here Jesmyn Ward in The New York Times, in words as poetic as befits the magnificent Ms. Morrison.
Toni Morrison wrote to us again and again, exhorting our beauty, making us grapple with our pain, reaffirming our humanity. Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace, her every paragraph, a cupping of her hands around our faces that said: I know you, I see you, we are together. She loved us when we prayed and sang and made love and danced. She loved us when we lied and sliced throats and disowned our children. She loved us at our best and our broken. She called us forth in her pages and made us experience and understand ourselves with kindness, with deeper knowing of all we had survived, all we had not, all we had made, all we had unmade, all we had become, all we could be. How she knew us! How she sang us to the world! And now that she is gone, how we weep for our Beloved!
And now in the The New York Review of Booksthis adaptation (subscription required) from Marilynne Robinson’s first lecture. An interesting (and unusual) discourse, with as a starting premise: capitalism, as an economic theory at the very least misunderstood and often very well perverted, an altar worshiped upon by many and just as equally disavowed, as American as the proverbial whatever but with its historical and societal roots in a reaction against the brutality of the Poor Laws and conditions of pre-Modern England (and Europe) and the liberality borne out of an understanding of Scripture, based on love and generosity, dating from Wycliff.
This is me speaking here, wondering out loud: I wonder whether it was the secularisation of this liberal thought in the 18th century, and an intellectualisation that single mindedly focused on the useful and forgot about things like charity and love, that paved the way for, firstly, a brutal capitalism and then the backlash of theoretical Marxism.
Though coming late to Marilynne Robinson, I was immediately captivated by her narrative form, the power of the characters and the moral integrity that rises above moralising.
Having written several posts during 2018-19 in respect to Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, I have taken the time to experiment a little and put together an edited collection; compiled in LaTeX and available in PDF from my Downloads page.
It has come to my attention that the second part of Marilynne Robinson’s recent lecture (embedded in my previous post) is now in essay (long) form, and as “Is Poverty Necessary?” the cover title of the June edition of Harper’s Magazine. Maybe you are lucky enough to get the one free piece a month – or even luckier and be a subscriber.
Now should you have listened to these lectures, you may agree that they really are quite dense in subject matter and meaning; especially the second part which harks back to the roots of classical economics at the beginning of industrialisation and the accompanying (and colliding) emerging political theories of liberalism, capitalism, marxism …I dare say I forgot some other “ism”s! In this respect I am very grateful to have some written words for guidance and more stringent study – at leisure if not pleasure.
A favourite “day in the life of” if ever there was one, is brought to mind again with The New York Timesreporting on the publication of a new reproduction of the full draft of what was tentatively titled “The Hours” and was to become Mrs. Dalloway. Absolutely beyond my modest budget, but an imagined treasure just the same!
Cover design Vanessa Bell, Hogarth Press, 1925.
Beyond the title, revealed (to me anyway!) is the metamorphose of Virginia Woolf’s initial idea of a grand post-war London narrative into a deceptively more modest work. The minutiose account of one woman on one day endures as one of the finest character studies in modern literature.
By the way, I’m collecting all things that come my way relating somehow to Mrs. Dalloway here, where links are also to be found to “The Hours” manuscripts held at the British Library.
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)
