The City of New York

We went to New York after New Year's. When we arrived a Penn Station and emerged onto 7th Ave, Daisy said, "Is
this New York City?" I said, "Yes, Daisy, this is New York City." A newspaper vendor heard us and interjected: "No, THIS is the City of New York." It was said with pride and warmth, a welcome. It reminded me of the humanity I always encounter there, in the busyness and among the crowds. I like seeing how New Yorkers live with many, many others and still retain their humor and generosity.

Reflections on 2008

As we approach the end of another year our thoughts often turn to family and friends.  We feel the distance between us and we wish time and space were lesser obstacles.
 
We recall with happiness our times with Beverly’s family in the Big Little[1] and Michigan.[2]  Our daughter Daisy and son Sloopy appreciated being with their grandparents[3] and cousins.[4]  We’re glad that some of the American cousins now live closer to New England.[5]  All this reminds us of family and friends whose company we have missed.[6]  Also, some friends visited us this year.[7] 
 
Last year we wrote about our no-mow lawn.[8] Yes, the grass grows only a few inches high and requires little mowing.[9]  But it also has attracted crabgrass and wasps.[10]  In our letter last year, we used our lawn as a horticultural metaphor of dashed hopes and human disappointment.  We’re pleased to say that we’ve found the solution to lawn worries: stop thinking about it.[11]  We spent little time, money, or worry on the lawn this year.  Taking off your glasses does wonders for the appearance of the lawn.
 
We’ve both[12] kept busy with work and Beverly has had some interesting professional trips.[13]  During the 2008-09 academic year we’re participating together in a yearlong seminar here at our university called “Visions of Nature.”  It’s informing our research[14] and we’re especially enjoying that we can participate together.
 
Like so many people, much of our focus this year was on politics and the economy.  We hope for the best[15] in a world where violence, greed, and suffering are too common.  May the new administration provide us -- both as a nation[16] and as individuals[17] -- with the inspiration and opportunity to live our lives more responsibly.
 
Now that we’ve given up our lawn concerns, we’re focused on the little people who live with us.  It’s harder to describe the wonder of parenthood than the worries of lawn care. How can we convey how our wise son and beautiful daughter amaze us?  We can’t, so we’ll limit the stories to two, one with Sloopy’s commentaries on our world and one with Daisy’s.
 
Daisy[18] has her opinions on the election of Barack Obama.  In our family, we don’t identify as “black” and “white,” but as “pink” and “brown.”[19] Obama, she insisted, was not the first black president, but the first brown president.  This may silly, but it’s become a fundamental principle for Daisy.  Weeks after the election, Beverly was reading the kids a story about George Washington.  “George Washington,” she told them, “was our first president.”  Daisy stopped her:  “He was our first pink president.”  Score one forDaisy.  American history reinterpreted: Two first presidents, more than two hundred years apart. 
 
Sloopy[20] is more interested in paleontology than politics, so he has an even longer-term view.  Although he doesn’t know much about our economic meltdown, he does understand the risks of extinction.  When we were at the Natural History Museum in New York in June, he was completely taken with the exhibit on evolution.  We thought it was the special effects, but the science made an impression.  Days after we left the museum, he asked, “What comes after humans?” 
 
Maybe crabgrass and hornets.  The next few years will tell us a lot.
 
Best and warmest wishes for any holidays you choose to celebrate.
 
 
 


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[1] Beverly’s sister Mary and brother-in-law John visited from Michigan.

[2] Where Beverly is from. We went there in July for Mary’s daughter Elizabeth’s wedding to Matt.

[3] Beverly’s father Vernon (who is 82) and his wife Betty (whose privacy on age issue we will respect) are healthy and happy. 

[4] Children often have an especially intimate relationship with cousins of five or more years older or younger.  Sloopy and Daisy admire their big cousins, but they especially idolize Will and Pete, the sons of Beverly’ sister Chris, who live in Arkansas.  They are 10 and 8 years old.

[5] By this we mean Kate, Laura, and Adam, Beverly’s brother Dave and his wife Lois’s children, who each live in different boroughs of New York City.

[6] Anyone not listed in a previous footnote, especially Owen’s sister Margaret and Ray (in France) and their children (all in Britain) Hazel (spouse Silvio and newborn Amos) and Simon (spouse Marie).

[7] Okay, very few and we won’t list them for fear of forgetting anyone and losing the few friends we have; we have taken the risk of listing family because they are easier to keep track of and harder to alienate.

[8] A slightly edited version is available in a post dated November 30, 2007 .

[9] We have a human-powered mower, which we use once a summer when the grass heads develop. This year it did a number on Beverly’s back, but we won’t get into that because it’s not festive to discuss injuries in a holiday letter.

[10] The wasps live in burrows, not to be confused with the boroughs where Beverly’s nieces and nephews live in New York.

[11] Last year when we googled “Rhode Island Wasps,” we learned about the Chafee, Brown, Tillinghast, Chase, and Sharpe families.  That wasn’t so helpful for our lawn care problems.

[12] Meaning Beverly and Owen, not Sloopy or Daisy, who don’t work much.

[13] Cologne, Boston, Boise (not so interesting, actually), Leiden, Burlington, and Chicago.

[14] Beverly’s current research is on people and birds in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Owen’s is on the extinction and possible re-breeding of the quagga, a sub-species of zebra in South Africa.

[15] Second-best, actually, would be fine with us.

[16] With apologies to our international friends who are reading this.  We hope you understand that Americans are focused on themselves.

[17] Maybe not Rod Blagojevich; he’s a bit far gone for political redemption.

[18] Almost five years old, enjoying pre-kindergarten.

[19]More innocuous markers of phenotypical difference.

[20] Six and a half years old, in the first grade and loving recess.

Sciatica

Nothing like Sciatica to kill a career as a blogger. It's been going on since March. Three physical therapists, two MDs, one PA, one chiropractor, one massage therapist later and I'm noting some improvement.

Reading my old posts, I'm surprised that I was feeling such grace last May and June. Was it that Obama had the nomination in the bag? Nothing so hopeful now.

What is it about Christmas that makes me want to blog?

Race in Gilead

To continue with Gilead: Apart from fatherhood, the theme in that grabs me is race. It's the place of slavery and race in this novel that justifies saying that the book is about America itself.

It takes a while for the theme to emerge and that's what's brilliant about it; race is easily submerged in white America, and Robinson makes her treatment of race more effective by framing the white town of Gilead its own terms before introducing the realities it ignores.

Two white individuals, Grandfather Ames and Jack Boughton, made closer connections to blacks and before we understand that they recognized race as a problem, we learn to mistrust them as the people of the town did. The once-abolitionist grandfather who appreciated the preaching at the Negro church had, according to Ames, a "strenuousness in ethical matters" and a "narrow vision." Jack Boughton got into all kinds of trouble. John Ames is a sympathetic narrator, but even he takes it for granted that these two men rightfully belong on the margins of society. If they're not even respectable, what claim can they make to criticize? The trajectories of these characters normalize the racial exclusions of American society.

Robinson's depiction of race is most deft in the Des Moines baseball story. Baseball may be the only thing the fathers, sons, friends, and brothers in Gilead have in common. When John was a boy, his ancient grandfather, missing one eye, took him all the way to Des Moines to watch Bud Fowler play. The game promised to be a great treat, but it was disappointing: the game rained out in the fifth inning. The denouement is even more of a non-event. Ames's recalls about Fowler: " I followed his career in the newspaper for years, until they started up the Negro Leagues, and then I sort of lost track of him."

This image is remarkable: a half-blind radical abolitionist taking his grandson to watch a black baseball hero. The whole thing went fell flat and years later his grandson still misses the point about why his grandfather chose this hero or about why excluding the hero from the sport was wrong. Through his widowed years, radio baseball was his lifeline, but John Ames can't see the hateful swell beneath this grace. What a bittersweet effect for readers when race appears in the definitive American pastoral: Iowa baseball. Nostalgia for Iowa tastes different once Bleeding Kansas is stirred in.

But John Ames doesn't sense the tension. He isn't concerned about what he recalls as a "nuisance" fire at the Negro Church. After the fire, the town's black population moved to Chicago, but Ames doesn't question the reasons for the exodus. The Negroes left; the Lithuanians moved in. To him, it's just a rhythm of peaceful town life.

Jack Boughton always could stir Ames up. At the very end Jack Boughton's story about race strikes him, and this is the last lesson of his life. It's a big lesson for a dying man and shakes his certitudes: "I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone's...It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand."

It's too late for Ames to address the question, but the book is written as a letter for his young son and is thus oriented toward the future. Ames's late revelation restores Kansas to the story he's telling about Iowa and America. "What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the Good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again."

I'm so moved by Robinson's treatment of race that I'm going to rag on one reviewer who just didn't get it. Tessa Hadley, who wrote on Gilead in the London Review of Books, entirely missed the point. It's too bad, because hers is one of the only early reviews to comment on the place of race in the book. Unfortunately, she didn't read carefully enough to see the development within Ames.

In fact, Hadley characterizes Ames as incapable of "fresh thought." The review is odd because it conflates a criticism of Ames's self-understanding with one of Robinson's own faith and politics. It states the book postulates "a continuum between the grandfather’s activism spurred by passionate faith and Ames’s late-life celebrations of a world radiant with God’s love." The reviewer hasn't figured out how the conversation with Jack Boughton humbled Ames's satisfaction with his small world.

Most egregiously, Hadley opines that at the end Ames achieves a "mere acquiescence to the existence of Jack’s mixed-race child [that] can’t stand all by itself for a significant engagement against injustice." Well, no, of course it couldn't, but Ames achieves more than a "mere acquiescence." Acquiescence would not cause him to feel as if he were on the "floor of hell." Because Hadley can't see that Ames has grown over the course of the book, she doesn't see that his late arrival at understanding magnifies the loss created by his death. His final words to his son are: "I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray that you find a way to be useful."

It's worthwhile, I think, to clarify this point. This message from a dying man to his son, is a most poignant statement of sadness and hope for this country.

Fatherhood in Gilead

I've read nine novels in the past year. Seven were by J.K. Rowling and two, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, were about fatherhood. Both won Pulitzer Prizes, both were immensely powerful.

I may be in a minority on this point, but compared with other McCarthy novels I read I found The Road to be relatively optimistic. The burnt-over world is utter dystopia, but the father and son love each other perfectly. At the end McCarthy suggests it's possible to live sustainably in an ashy world without photosynthesis, which is more hopeful than anything current science tells us. So, the book left me feeling more "up" than I did after reading All the Pretty Horses, even if it did motivate me to start researching what Mormons recommend for a year's food supply.

I've thought about McCarthy's world a lot, but what with the cannibalism and buggery, I don't think I could bear to read it again, much less see the movie. On the other hand, I've just reread Gilead and it's haunting me. All the reviews make much of the narrator's Calvinism, but it's an atypical sort of Calvinism. His religion is of a gracious father God; he barely mentions Jesus. I guess it's possible that a Congregational minister in southwest Iowa could be so possessed by everyday grace to the exclusion of sin and atonement, but he would be a remote outlier among his preacher peers.

Still, I am captured by his voice, his story. It's a story of fathers and sons and of their relations with each other, God, and finally America. Ames is facing death and is recounting his life for the benefit of his young son. He makes much of the observation that the Bible has no bad parents. Similarly, the fathers in the book aren't absent or abusive to children (save one). For their part, the youth recognize and respect their fathers, but in every case but one, fathers and sons suffer estrangement and agony. As Ames puts it: "A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension." Robinson's fine craft produces a compelling story of generational tension mutating and reproducing itself.

John Ames came from a male line of preachers, but unity in doctrine or practice evaded them. The grandfather had been a radical abolitionist in Bleeding Kansas. When his son, Ames's father, witnessed his violence in the name of God's fury, he could not reconcile himself to it. Decades later, frustrated with the lack of urgency in his son's religion, the old man ran back to Kansas to die. In the next generation, John Ames's older brother Edward studied theology, but broke with their father over the faith itself. John became a preacher and took up his father's church in Gilead.

John's first wife and daughter died when he was young, but the pattern of estrangement continues with his namesake, the child of his best friend, the Presbyterian preacher "old Boughten." No common prodigal, Jack Boughton is a charmer with a deep mean streak. Nonetheless, Rev. Boughten loves him. John Ames, on the other hand, sees through Jack and doesn't like the view. The only unfraught father-son relationship is between the dying Ames and his adored boy, born after his second marriage when he was sixty-seven.

Ames is weak and sick. His heart is giving out and his imminent death will be a tragedy for his boy and wife, younger by probably forty years. His wife also had seen untold loss and hardship before she met him. It is all sadder because Ames never saved any money and his wife and boy will have a hard life after he goes. But no one is bitter. After seven years of unexpected love, Ames is filled with a luminous appreciation for life, God, his son, and his wife. There's nothing clap-happy about it, and he never sentimentalizes pain and poverty. Ames says, "There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient." Under Robinson's hand, this makes sense.

As powerful as the story of the late-blooming, soon-withering fatherhood is, I was more rattled by Ames's revelations about himself and his own father. These are withheld until the end of the letter to his son. At the end of his preaching career, John Ames's father left poor, dusty, backwards Gilead to retire on the Gulf Coast with his rationalist older son Edward. The pretext was the climate, but move gave him the opportunity to shed his religion. (Thinking it over, this is more implausible to me than Ames's beatifics.) Having abandoned Gilead, Ames senior wanted union with both his sons, Edward the atheist philosophy professor and John the widowed small-town preacher. The father returned to Gilead to invite John to join them, to convince him that his world and God were too limited to deserve such dedication.

John couldn't abandon the town or his faith. He also couldn't tolerate his father's condescension. His enduring anger toward his father is rivaled only by that for the villainous Jack Boughton. Ames may not have found any unfaithful fathers in the Bible, but his own father turned away from him. Ames recounts for his own son: "My father threw me back on myself, and on the Lord. That's a fact, so I find little to regret. It cost me a good deal of sorrow, but I learned from it."

John Ames's comfort lies in God, the perfect father whose love had carried him through the loss of a spouse, child, and father. It's a mark of God's grace that his beloved wife first came to his church on Pentecost. In dying, he leaves his wife, his son, and himself to that mercy. The close of the book allows Ames realization of Gilead's and his own limitations, but also a reconciliation with Jack Boughton, delivered in soaring, aching language. His comfort is so deep and his hope so modest that there's no embarrassment in feeling it with him. For me, it was an honor to have known John Ames, even if I didn't always understand him, even if he never mounted a prophetic call such as his grandfather's.