My Own RE:public – Page 41 – … of life, of literature … & MORE

Remembering race and hate in 1950s America…

…& as portrayed in Robinson’s “Home”

This middle book is certainly the most political of the series; offering a socially critical view of that immediate post-war decade, as “out the ashes of…” these prosperous times are being relativized by a simmering discontent as many old norms are being questioned, and young men and women begin to come to the fore unencumbered by the prejudices of previous generations.

I am especially thinking here about Jack Boughton’s increasing despair at his father’s ambivalence to the plight of black Americans and rising tide of civil unrest, for example whilst watching the Montgomery riots on the newly bought TV:

The old man said, “I do believe it is necessary to enforce the law. The Apostle Paul says we should do everything ‘decently and in order’ You can’t have people running around the streets like that.
Home, Marilynne Robinson, Virago UK paperback ed. p. 102

And when Jack raises the matter of Emmett Till the following exchange ensues:

“[…]the Negro […] attacked the white woman?” Jack said, “He was a kid […]fourteen […]he whistled at a white woman.” His father said, “I think there must have been more to it […] There was a trial.” Jack said, “There was no trial. He was murdered. He was a child and they murdered him.”
p. 163

And I am particularly thinking about this at the moment in conjunction with this excellent feature in the New York Times, enhanced with brilliant images, reporting on the legacy of Emmett Till’s murder and the ways people choose to, or choose not to, memorialize.

…
In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago walked in to buy candy. After being accused of whistling at the white woman behind the counter, he was later kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
The murder of Emmett Till is remembered as one of the most hideous hate crimes of the 20th century, a brutal episode in American history that helped kindle the civil rights movement. And the place where it all began, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, is still standing. Barely.
Today, the store is crumbling, roofless and covered in vines. On several occasions, preservationists, politicians and business leaders — even the State of Mississippi — have tried to save its remaining four walls. But no consensus has been reached…
The New York Times February 20 2019

Literature is of course another way of memorializing, and Marilynne Robinson indeed incorporates the racial tensions and ambivalence of her youth (that so often evolved into hate) in her writing. I dare say too she would admit her anger and sadness that so much remains unresolved, and even have in a different way become exacerbated.

Ames, Edwards, Boughton & what’s in a name

I found it really quite interesting and often enlightening to consider Marilynne Robinson’s various name choices in her Gilead trilogy (that is – to date, trilogy!), and seeking out hidden meanings and symbolic. And they are certainly there aplenty; first and foremost, Gilead, that biblical place offering balm for souls searching, and in the names of siblings and children – all those Johns and Edwards, and Glory and Grace. Not immediately apparent to me was the significance one could give to the two family names. It must be said, Robinson could of course have chosen them from the recesses of her mind, or even at random! But anyway for what it’s worth…

WILLIAM AMES (1576-1633)

William Ames
by William Marshall
line engraving, published 1633
NPG D9511
© National Portrait Gallery, London

William Ames was an important Protestant theologian, educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, who by and by fell afoul of the clerical elite with his rigid Calvinist and staunch Puritan views (can said points of view be anything else but?), and specifically in relation to the debauchery and excesses (again, to his mind) surrounding the Twelve Days of Christmas. Persona non-grata on the island it then seems, he travelled to the Netherlands, and initially courted again controversy – this time with a dispute to do with the Arminian position of predestination. Nevertheless, he obtained important university teaching positions, and his person and writings were to become influential in reformed theological circles in Holland, and flourished across the Atlantic in the fledgling New England colony (where he had hoped to go before being hindered by ill health) and the purity of faith embraced there.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Probably the most prominent American theologian, Jonathan Edwards‘ fusion of Calvinism and Puritanism became one of the defining aspects of American protestantism, especially through the Great Awakening and Revival Theology period of the mid-eighteenth century, and his influence and legacy remain to this day theologically pertinent, and absolute to an understanding of American colonial history (see all things Perry Miller.)

GEORGE HENRY BOUGHTON (1833-1905)

*Pilgrims Going to Church George Henry Boughton, (1867;* New York Historical Society).

A bit of a stretch – but anyway. George Henry Boughton was born in Norwich in England but grew up in Albany, New York. No learned man of church and theology here, Boughton was a painter and illustrator! The subject matter of his work though was very often drawn from New England colonial history, and per se therefore often representing Puritan life.

With my thoughts on Lila Ames I included an image from George Henry Boughton, and here is another that may very well be seen as representative of Lila’s quest for the grace and salvation that the Rev. John Ames believes and preaches.

Woman Kneeling in Prayer, George Henry Boughton, ca. 1860. The Walters Art Museum

Interestingly, Boughton also illustrated the 1881 edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and when I think of Lila, I can’t help but think of Hester Prynne and the inner dignity and strength that they share, enabling them to surmount extreme denigration and hardship.

Mrs. Ames

As we accompany Rev. Ames as he leaves testament to a good life lived in Gilead, his wife has been at his side for eight years perhaps, borne his child, grown into herself – distant still, but accepted. She is after all Mrs. Ames. Lila.

Told differently again is this third novel of the series. It is in the third person, but from the very reliable point of view of the subject – Lila’s voice shines through. Lacking the intellectual stringency of the first and the emotional roller-coaster ride of the second, and the complexity of both, it shines instead with its honesty and integrity and the more simple and direct tone.

*Migrant Mother – Dorothea Lange source: Library of Congress*

Ah, Lila! Taken, kidnapped, saved, however one may look at it, as a feeble five year old by the wandering Doll, and from the most desolate and abused circumstances. Their bonding and time together, with and without the company of itinerant workers, was, in those pre-Depression years and the harsher times to come, what was to define her, and give her the inner strength in the times spent alone on the road and in a St. Louis brothel.

One is left to imagine the many years from childhood to adulthood, to ponder quite how this clever woman, this kind woman, lived her life, to imagine it as equal and as flawed in all its goodness to that of the Reverend Ames; he who she on whim, or an inner sense of destiny, pleaded for and who took then her as wife, and without hesitation – that wondrous lost soul; searching there for shelter one day at his church door. Did Rev. Ames presume himself saviour? Who saved whom at God’s door?

*Woman at Church Door, George Henry Boughton, circa 1860*

Marilynne Robinson, in the parlance of these days, delivers again, and with her unique voice and an abiding humanity. Lila provides another fine character portrait from which the narrative springs; drawing one again near to the essence and limits of the loneliness, wariness and despair that pervades the little world of Gilead and the greater world of humankind, and along the way fosters a belief in the capacity to grow and change.

Remarkable.

On being at home…

Home may well mean many things for many people – there is that of birth or formative years, and that “where the heart is”; there is a physical place and a sensory place, and a home of the imagination. And too there is the home one recognises and that which one denies, and the home you take with you and the one you leave behind. There is that state of being at home with oneself. It is remarkably elusive this “home” thing.

Cover of the first edition published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Home is also the title of Marilynne Robinson’s 2008 follow-up novel to Gilead, which so captivated me with the radicality of its givenness. More a companion of sorts than a sequel, Home runs parallel in time, say through the Spring and Summer of 1956 – sometimes taking its own trajectory and sometimes entwined with Ames’ record; enhancing that, putting things right, begging the question of where reliability lies. I could only approach Home in the context of that first reading, which brought with it all the sympathies and associations I had formed.

I like to think of it in this way: Whilst our Reverend Ames is sitting down writing his very personal testimonial for his son, over at the Boughton household we have the recently returned Glory and that wayward, beloved brother Jack; caring for a dying father and coming to their own reckoning of sorts with themselves and one another

I see now those themes that predominated in Gilead – loneliness, forgiveness, sorrow, all that weariness and wariness – as being observed and described by Rev. Ames; in more soul searching moments in terms of himself, more often though pertaining to those nearest and dearest, but in Home the emotionally engaged reader lives them with the protagonists; the psychology of it all becomes reality. The change of narrative style to the third person, predominately from Glory’s point of view, and the wonderful dialogic exchanges facilitates this new rendering.

Glory, seemingly peripheral for Ames’ story, is central to this narrative, and I loved getting to know this woman – intelligent, duped by a bounder, and ashamed, felt left behind by life and her own aspirations. I even loved the tears. Teary rhymes with weary I know.

It is through Glory’s eyes that we see the tormented Jack, and with her we approach some knowledge and understanding of the lonely, desperate boy who never felt at home in this the family home, but treasures every memory, every detail. Dutifully, have the other siblings come “home” over all the years – and been glad enough to leave – but Jack has carried that “home” to which he never felt as if he belonged with him every day; and the burden heavy. What is home?

Jack and Glory: Their trials and tribulations, what they bring home with them, and what they seek and what they find instead; it may not be the sought for resolution, but there is a way there – and the reader’s hope that it be found.

With Home, Marilynne Robinson delivers again her deep Christian and human convictions in a prose that is sometimes more beautiful and profound than the profane heart or head can bear – but borne it is, and one is just left wondering at the limits of own profanity!

A play upon Pamela

I have read in the last days of Cate Blanchett’s performance in a controversial new play for the National Theater in London, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, whereby the content is such that forwarning is given to the faint of heart and/or presumably the easily (or perhaps usually not so easily) offended. That it should have inspiration in the 18th century and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and the very beginnings of the novel as a form!

‘Mr B Finds Pamela Writing’ – oil on canvas, 1743-4, the first of a series of 12 paintings by Joseph Highmore illustrating scenes from Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

This piece at The Guardian by John Mullan gives an interesting perspective; relating the power dynamics at play and the predatory behaviour of one protagonist and the dilemmas of the other, with concerns and incidents we only know of too well in the here and now.

Written as a series of letters, and mostly by Pamela, Richardson seems to have come by a literary form adequate in conjuring the immediacy of a complicated and evolving relationship. Martin Crimp and Katie Mitchell and their players have come up with their own modern version (or vision!), to the satisfaction and dis- in equal measure it seems!

Love the Blanchett, would have loved to have seen this! London (I do believe the aforesaid has forsaken her antipodean home – again!) and the theatre – that’s a thing not many places can top!

A dedicated reading

I have always noted with interest the dedication and epigraph of a book – to whom if anyone – precise or otherwise (“To A.B.C. with love”!), sincere or ironic, inspirational or nonsensical. Sometimes they may mean nothing to anyone other than the author, but sometimes they are revealing (I think this is called paratextual).

My attention recently diverted to thinking about Puritans (who I have never thought much about before!), I recalled Margaret Atwood’s dedication of The Handmaid’s Tale to the historian Perry Miller (and Mary Webster – an Atwood ancestor and victim of the Salem witch trials!) who so impressed her whilst at Harvard in the early sixties.

Confounded somewhat about how those first Puritans could reemerge so diabolically in her Republic of Gilead (and at the same time dwell in the good spirit of a Reverend Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel), and fairly ignorant to colonial New England history, and absolutely to the theological dimensions, I have resolved therefore to pursue a little of my own research (over time!). And a starting point may well be at least some reading of Perry Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Quite how far I will get I don’t know; it does seem somewhat daunting!

I have wondered though about that “Historical Note” that bookended rather than framed Atwood’s novel, and I think I can see that this literary device may have been influenced by what she took from Miller all those years ago; something perhaps like history to be seen in continuity, as inherited over and over, and inextricably embellished all the way along with the set of beliefs of the historian and his or her time. Atwood characterises her (rather obnoxious) historian as one analysing the past from the physical and intellectual coordinates of his present; oblivious that all these 200 years on he is carrying all the baggage from those two centuries. For Miller I think that meant that the Puritanism of colonial New England had only previously been understood in evidential terms, rather than conceding that the history being told was affected by the America of the ensuing years and the present.

And then there is Atwood’s “Gilead”

orig_cover_02 — Cover of 1st edition of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Not too long ago, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and so it’s hardly any wonder that while reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel I was very much struck by these two very different fictional places being called Gilead – on the one hand Atwood’s dystopian rogue nation and on the other Robinson’s small town anywhere. Certainly, both are American, of a sort; one most definitely imagined, a pessimistic vision. And the other? A place of hope, romanticised like a prairie legend. And both are the scene for patriarchal narratives, albeit of a very different nature, and the biblical reference that lends both their name can be interpreted such as to justify the respective authorial intent. But the diabolical darkness of one is so contrary to the simple human failings and joys of the other, that one is tempted to take note and look not much deeper. But it was the coincidence (?) of place name that interested me, and the parallels that are exposed I find revealing and worthy of some thought.

gileadcover — Cover of the first edition of *Gilead* by Marilynne Robinson

Firstly, going back to the name. Gilead means “hill of testimony” – at least that is one accepted meaning – and both narratives are presented as testimonies – from a dying Rev. Ames and a handmaid (Offred) on the run (we think!) – and both tell their stories in that temporal fragmented way particular to memory. And as I said above, one just can’t get pass the generations of men and the societies they have defined; be it as men of God offering their interpretations of church and Godliness on a patch of Mid-western earth, or as degenerate Sons of Jacob perverting religion and taking the notion of patriarchy to its radical end in a Godless New England.

It also interests me that, like Atwood’s Handmaids and Commanders, Lila is so much younger than the good Reverend Ames, and this follows the Biblical narratives of old men and young women (especially the Israelite patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), and both stories are driven by fertility, not just of man and woman but also of the land and its habitability and production affected by contamination and climate (and one could ask, where lies the fault: with the sins of man or by the will of God). This latter, this equating the people with the land works for both narratives and, as Ames’ would say, that is a wonder.

“Virginia Woolf? – Snob!

Richard Wright? – Sexist! Dostoyevsky? – Anti-Semite! ” So, Brian Morton asks in The New York Times, just how should we read great writers from the past whose moral blind spots offend us?

I read the above piece while underway yesterday – a really good contribution I think to the fiercely debated topic of how to approach literary works written in the historical past. I particularly liked Morton’s time machine analogy! And I was of course immediately alert to the “snob” accusation against Virginia Woolf – one which I happened to use of her a couple of days ago. It seems as a reader I instinctively cope with the “snob” Woolf under the guise of a time-traveler as Morton suggests. Though “snob” is a rather mild description, one could just as well attach the “anti-semite” tag to her also – the stereotypical language she uses of Leonard Woolf and his family, amongst others, would be untenable today. Nor would it be hard to find, from she an icon of women’s literature, some ideas that may today be considered sexist; for even she was not immune to the patriarchal conditioning rooted in the class structures of the society in which she lived. And her ideas on race and intelligence were very much colored by contemporary thinking on social-Darwinism and eugenics popular in her social milieu.