Wanting my own way

The teenagers are causing me angst.  It's not their behavior. It's the decisions we have to make. Or rather, they have to make. How can I agonize so much over mission trips and summer jobs and camps? I'm having a hard time letting them make up their own minds.  Looming like a dark cloud is the specter of college decisions. The oldest filled out an inquiry form for the Naval Academy. NOOOO! I want to say. You'll have no control over your life!

And yet we've met so many people we've loved.  And been to so many wonderful places. And then we had to leave them all.

Tarague Beach, Guam

Daily I am confronting my need to control everyone and everything in my household. I snap at the kids and the husband when plans for the weekend fall through. No camping trip in Sequoia this weekend. No swim team for the summer. I keep trying to direct the kids toward what I want them to do - read this book! Clean your room! Draw a picture for a card! Get off the computer! Think about what you want to do with your life! I feel like the scroogey dad in that old Twisted Sister video.

It's a good thing we have a baby in the house because those tense moments are punctuated by coos and gurgles - we're all trying really hard to get the baby to smile. Half an hour can pass while we make faces over her or watch her make faces. Baby TV.

Almost caught the smile!

Picking matching outfits.

She must have said something really funny. Or pooped.

Most photographed baby ever. I keep finding more photos on my phone.

Over the weekend we watched Forest Gump with the older boys, and I started to feel weepy.  Not so much because of the movie - I'm not one to succumb to tearjerkers, although I love when Forest runs - but because life is changing so rapidly, both my home life and life at large. I had forgotten some of the overtly religious moments in that movie. Mrs. Gump talking about God. Lt. Dan challenging God in the hurricane. Forest's loyalty to his friends and family. References to fate vs. free will. Could that movie be made today? Is it going to be harder and harder to make movies in which a Christian worldview is a given?

A radio interview on NPR with two pot smokers made me realize yet again how that less and less is taboo. Fewer things are scandalous. As the concept of sin disappears so does drama.  Will metaphysical conflicts like that of Lt. Dan lose their ability to cause suspense?  Will art and literature no longer be created around the conflict between man and God - will that interior conflict no longer mean anything if communal faith is banned from the marketplace?

In the newspaper I came across the quote from William Faulkner from Requiem for a Nun that captures some of the melancholy of the weekend: "The past is never dead; it's not even past. If it were, there would be no grief or sorrow." No doubt art and literature will continue to play around the drama of love and loss.

And the conflict between parent and child still exists. In our home, the conflict is almost all within me for now. I want my son to make his own decisions about what and where he studies, but I also want to make that decision for him.  I struggle to find a balance between guiding and controlling. The next year will test my resolve to be a source of guidance and encouragement.  These little boys, and their siblings, have been a source of delight all their lives.

Delighted by cake.

Good kids.

More on Faulkner: Thoughts on truth in Go Down, Moses

On our trip to Oxford, we talked a bit about what makes Faulkner so remarkable. Why is Faulkner’s home preserved, but not houses belonging to someone, like say Rebecca Wells, whose Ya-Ya books everyone read 10 years ago, but no one talks about anymore because they are all talking about Kathryn Stockett, whose The Help was going on its second year as the number one seller at the little bookstore (and whose house will also probably remain in obscurity)? If it weren’t for Oprah’s plug a couple of years ago, Faulkner would have even fewer readers today.

The import of Faulkner seems obvious when you read Southern Chick Lit and Faulkner in relatively close succession (a year apart?), but even so, trying to get someone to put down The Help and pick up Absalom, Absalom is hard. The easiest answer is just to say he’s a great writer because his work is hard to read. Isn’t being difficult a requirement of great books? You have to keep rereading to get the sense. One stumbling block is that Faulkner's cadence can lull you into reading along until suddenly you realize you have no idea what just happened and you have to go back and reread the last twenty pages. I’ve been digging through Go Down, Moses, for at least three weeks now, and am still putting together the pieces. I just finished the “Delta Autumn” episode, in which Isaac McCaslin, the central character, is now an old man on a hunting trip with the younger, fastpaced, modern descendents of the old men with whom McCaslin once hunted. (I’m nearly through the book, but I had time to write today, so I’m noting this before I’m finished. -- To write or to read in a spare hour? I can read late at night, but not type, so I’ll finish the last episode, “Go Down, Moses” tonight, I hope…)

In one book, Faulkner has spanned generations and issues other southern writers capitalize upon, like race and gender, but he’s also written evocatively of coming of age, anxiety of influence and ownership, freedom and legacies, shame and pride, lost treasures, lost love, lost mentors, lost nobility, lost edens. The trick is that you’re several pages on before you realize the full import of what you’ve just read. You’ve encountered some other loss before you’ve fully mourned the first. Reading the observation of old Ike in “Delta Autumn” of the lost wilderness (I started to quote a sentence but it went on too long, describing forests plowed into open fields, exhausted workers, neon lights, the replacement of the panther’s scream for the locomotives hoot, the Indian language reduced to monikers of rivers)after I’d just spent a week experiencing the wilderness that was there through the observations of young Ike hunting in “The Bear” is heart wrenching. How could the Major de Spain sell out his land? How could Ike’s denial of his inheritance have no impact? Or perhaps if he had taken on that illegitimate birthrite, maybe he could have saved an acre from being plowed under.

So there is part of the power of Faulkner. He brings to life the complexity of the soul. He makes you mourn. Catharsis. The whole time I was reading “Delta Autumn” I was thinking of my own grandfather, who grew up hunting near his boyhood home in Illinois, but as a grown-up, travelled as far away as Canada to find wilderness. Shortly after my parents moved us from Indianapolis to a more rural (at the time) county, he pointed out a woods near our new home that was once part of the largest forest in Indiana. He had hunted there as a young man. For a couple of years after we moved, we could ramble through that woods on deer paths or paths of our own making, noting wildflowers, finding fallen trees to play around, hiding from each other. But one day the telltale orange plastic ties of a surveyor showed up, and the woods was subdivided into quarter acre lots. For a summer or two it was fun to ride our bikes on the dirt roads soon to be covered with asphalt and to run in and out of houses under construction, but by the time we hit adolescence, the fun was over, and the subdivision was full of crabby wives who yelled at us about the dangers of construction sites. The woods and several small farms adjacent were fully developed by the time I graduated from high school ten years later.


But that has little to do with Faulkner and his place in the canon of great books, except in that he helps to uncover the import of such losses and the capacity for people to carry on. So while he makes you mourn bad choices and losses, he also gives insight into the possibilities that make the human heart noble, and brings to life men, not only ones who fall into shame, but others who illustrate nobility such as Sam Fathers and Isaac and Isaac’s uncle McCaslin, “who had been born too late into the old time and too soon for the new.”

Near the end of "The Bear," McCaslin says:

“Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you don’t have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame. But you can’t be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living.” 

That Faulkner does think of all that and try to give it life makes his work unforgettable, ponderable, worth going back to again and again to remind one's self of those possibilities.

Perhaps the most opaque section of Go Down, Moses is the section in which Ike is renouncing his inheritance and trying to explain why to his uncle McCaslin. At one point I just gave up trying to figure out whose voice was speaking. But this exchange on truth I loved: McCaslin takes down a book and reads Keats to Isaac:

“’She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss,’ McCaslin said: ‘Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.’” Then he explains how the poem is really about truth: “Truth is one. It doesn’t change. It covers all things which touch the heart. – honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love. . . . Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes truth, as far as we know truth.”

This passage follows what Isaac had said when he declared that the land he was to inherit could not be owned:

“There are some things He said in the Book, and some things reported of Him that He did not say. And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows. He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth… but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart. Because the men who wrote his Book for Him were writing about the truth and there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart.”

McCaslin questions whether these men were liars and Isaac responds:

“Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart’s truth out of the heart’s driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them. What they were trying to tell, what He wanted said, was too simple. It had to be expounded in the everyday terms which they were familiar with and could comprehend, not only those who listened but those who told it too, because if they who were that near to Him as to have been elected from among all who breathed and spoke language to transcribe and relay His words, could comprehend truth only through the complexity of passion and lust and hate and fear which drives the heart, what distance back to truth must they traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-mouth?”

Wise words for a 21 year old.

Here are wise words from a 53 year old Faulkner. The closing words of his speech in acceptance of the Nobel prize:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The complete, brief speech and audio recording of it is here.

Weekend Ramble: Trip to Oxford, MS, and Rowan Oak, Home of William Faulkner

Faulkner's library

Faulkner's desk in his living room at Rowan Oak

This past weekend my husband and I undertook to nourish our marriage by taking a trip sans children. We began planning this trip before my husband returned from deployment last fall, and our original destination was someplace a little more far-flung/exotic – Italy, Greece, Ireland? – for an extended period – a week or two? But in the hurry-burry of return to regular life, our romantic getaway shrank in size and scope. Since our time in Mississippi is drawing to a close, we realized we better hurry up and see the sights here, so we decided to jaunt up north for a weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, home of Ole Miss and William Faulkner’s last abode. We were joined by my cousin, who wrote her senior thesis on Faulkner, and her husband, to add to the fun.

Oxford is quite different from coastal Mississippi. You can imagine that its rolling hills at one time would have been quite wooded, and although many of the buildings built before the Civil War were burned by Union troops, the town still wears a little of the stamp of antebellum life. Wide two-story porches, tall windows and other elements of Greek revival architecture dominate the homes. We stayed in an inn characterized by those elements, although with minimalist furnishings, right between the University and the center of town, Jackson Square, so we could walk everywhere.

And walk we did. The weather couldn’t have cooperated more favorably – the sun warmed the mercury to about 75 for the weekend, and the warm temps brought out the co-eds in their shortest mini-dresses. Oxford seems to be a town with a high proportion of pretty girls, but then again, it is not hard to be beautiful when you are young.


Oxford also has a nice high proportion of book stores – the main square has three, although they all seem to be related: Square Books, a glorious incarnation of what a book store should be – shelves and shelves of books, arranged by genre and author and subject, so that you have to explore to find what you are looking for; Books on the Square, Jr, the children’s book store; and Off the Square Books, featuring sale and remaindered items, a sort of sad, bargain basement store where books go to yellow. I did my part for the local economy and purchased a copy of a book of children’s ghost stories told by William Faulkner to his daughter and niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, who authored the collection Ghosts of Rowan Oak, for our kids, and a Library of America collection of four of Faulkner’s books. Although I am almost through Go Down, Moses, one of the books in this collection, I wanted to read A Fable, Faulkner’s retelling of the Passion narrative through the experience of a soldier in WWI, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, but the only copy the bookstore had was a badly printed, poorly bound paperback. The  complete L of A collected works runs four or five volumes.

A third thing Oxford has going for it are delicious restaurants: our best meal was at the City Grocery, a place deservedly awarded a James Beard Best Southern Chef award. Most delectable was the starter: a slice of savory cheesecake made from chevre with roasted peppers and crab on a pecan crust. Too good.


The highlight and purpose of the trip was to peek into the life of William Faulkner. Visiting his home for the last 30 or so years of his life, named Rowan Oak, offers more than just a peek. The University of Mississippi has preserved a number of the acres surrounding his home, so we could walk through the woods where he used to sneak off to imbibe some local liquor. The trail was accessed just a couple blocks from our hotel and winded about a quarter mile to the house.  Baseball fans and traffic murmured in the distance, but the mockingbirds did a nice job of contributing to a feeling of remoteness.

You can visit the grounds of Rowan Oak any time, and when we first approached, early Friday evening, we interrupted a couple of romantic picnickers, who had brought a guitar along for serenades. But I can’t imagine the lovers reading Faulkner to each other without starting to drift into a late afternoon snooze.

The house appears grand with a brick walk flanked by cypresses planted to deter yellow fever leading to the main entrance, but it is not large. The property is beautiful, and in a couple weeks, it will probably be even prettier when the jonquils and redbuds burst into bloom.


Visiting historic homes is always a little funny. As museums, they are wonderful ways of envisioning the past, but a lurking feeling that you’re trespassing still haunts you. Faulkner’s daughter Jill only died a few years ago in 2008. You wonder how she felt about people gaping at the artifacts Faulkner used in his private life on display: cameras, a tobacco tin, his and  her riding boots, a box of Shakespeare's collected works. On the other hand, she apparently set many of the terms of the preservation of the house, dictating, for example, that there would be no gift shop. (A welcome term, I think.)


The tour of the home is self-guided. We came back to the property Saturday morning and shuffled through the halls, peering into the cordoned-off rooms, and studying the display cases in the hallway of some Faulkner ephemera.  I especially enjoyed browsing a large scrapbook of newspaper clips. Plaques with excerpts of Faulkner's works and interpretive information prevented the house from feeling truly homey, but they added quite a bit of background information, such as the tidbit that Faulkner and his wife Estelle were high school sweethearts. Her father did not approve of Faulkner's desire to be a writer, so their romance was cut short, only to resume years later after she divorced the man of  whom her father approved. 

After wandering the grounds, peeking into stables and servants quarters and resting in the sunshine a few minutes, we hiked on to the cemetery to find Faulkner’s grave. The grave occupies an unassuming spot on the side, not the crest, of a hill, rather close to the road. Faulkner was laid to rest in 1962, and ten years later, his wife Estelle was buried next him. Above his head is buried his stepson. A vacant spot for another member of the Faulkner family remains next to the stepson, but I suspect that plot will remain empty. How many Faulkner descendents remain unburied?  Offerings littering the gravesite include cigarette butts, pennies, and a broken Jack Daniels bottle. We offered up the “Requiescat in pace” prayer for the man who said to students at University of Virginia: "Christianity has never harmed me and I hope I have never harmed it. I have the sort of provincial Christian background which one takes for granted without thinking to much about it, probably . . . within my own rights, I feel I am a good Christian - whether it would please anyone else's standard or not, I don't know."  Then we moved on.

This summary of the weekend would be incomplete if I failed to mention a couple other highlights: Saturday evening, in lieu of hanging out at one of the college bars or going to a Jimmy Eat World concert, we attended a performance of baroque pieces entitled “The Virtuouso Viol,” performed by Alison Crum on the viola da gamba accompanied by Roy Marks on the theorbo, an instrument I had never heard of before. The husbands were commended for staying awake. And for Sunday Mass, we participated in the service at St. John the Evangelist, the parish right in front of the gates to the University, which was preached by a youngish priest who gave a rousing homily, which he closed by noting that new construction was beginning on the parish hall behind the church. “Parents, please practice extra vigilance with your children,” he advised, “And kids, if you play in the dirt, the devil will eat your face off!” A little fire and brimstone for Sunday morning.



The woodland path



Yellow cedar line walk to Rowan Oak




Faulkner's fireplace

 




  

   

The smokehouse

Servants' quarters



Faulkner's grave is in the background.



*I am not being recompensed by the city of Oxford for this travelogue, but I'd happily accept if offered compensation!

Books on the Square - delight!

Bathroom at the bookstore

Signed photos of visiting authors



Breakfast at Triplet Day Drugstore on the coast. Beignets as big as your head for dessert.



Required tourist trap.

Spring is here!

Happy Birthday, William Faulkner

He would be 113 today.

Still on my list of things to see in Mississippi is his hometown in Oxford, which supposedly has a great bookstore.

And still on my list of books to finish is Soldiers' Pay, his first novel, from whence comes this first paragraph:

"Lowe, Julian, number ____, late a Flying Cadet, Umptieth Squadron, Air Service, known as "One Wing" by the other embryonic aces of his flight, regarded the world with a yellow and disgruntled eye. He suffered the same jaundice that many a more booted one than he did, from Flight Commanders through Generals to the ambrosial single-barred (not to mention that inexplicable beast of the field which the French so beautifully call an aspiring aviator); they had stopped the war on him."

Cultivating nobility

I 've heard it said that the South was a feudal society that not only suffered from the wrongs associated with that society, slavery, but also mirrored its cultivation of nobility. Returning to Southern lit as a reader for enjoyment rather than as a reader for a grade, I realize that I can never really identify with some of these characters who have "help" around.  I don't have any housekeepers, gardeners or cooks, and don't know anyone who does or did have them on fulltime bases.  I feel sorry for Benjy getting stuck with Versh and Luther all the time, but I feel sorry for them, too, getting stuck with him, and I'm not sure I'm supposed to.  Does keeping help around the house emphasize nobility, a kind of elevation and separation from all the lowly around? Does having lowlies around the house make moms and dads feel noble? If I'm not paying my current "help", does it still make me seem more noble? (I do reimburse with wii and computer time...)

Another list, to be continued

I started reading The Sound and the Fury again, in my attempt to reacquaint or newly acquaint myself with the literature of Mississippi. Despite having such a boggy, backwoods reputation, the state has certainly outshown my homestate of Indiana in producing literary stars. Not that Hoosiers are known for being particularly poetic, considering the best known poet of Indiana is James Whitcomb Riley, whose poetry is rarely found in collegiate anthologies, but can be appreciated for its dramatic effect.  Lew Wallace had a home near where we were living in IN several years ago, so I finally read Ben Hur and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Gene Stratton Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost was a favorite when I was in middle school; I should add it to my reread list.

On that list: in addition to Mississippians (and children's books), I've been trying to reread novels or authors I liked to try to remember why I liked them.  My adolescent reading was centered around reading a list of "classics" and "recommended for college" books that I plowed through without direction to get to the end of the list. The Sound and the Fury was one of these books, and a book I've read about more than I've spent time with. Faulkner has premier status among the American canon, and although I could tell you why others think so, I couldn't tell you whether I agree, except to parrot what I can remember of the lectures of Dr. Cowan, the mythological Southern Lit professor at UD.

So now I'm trying to figure out the chronology of what Benjy/Maury is perceiving.  This subjectivity of time reminds me of what my sister-in-law told me about 2012 and Mayan calendars, which led me to compare it to Pope B's description of the nature of time/eternity in The Spirit of the Liturgy. My head is starting to spin with the remembering.

But even though reading S and F is slow going, Faulkner's genuis is evident. What inspired him to take this perspective, and to take the risk of writing this back and forth chronology/ point of view that has been mimicked, often poorly (The Help comes to mind), ever since?

Other novels I relatively recently reenjoyed:
The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter
Cry, the Beloved Country
David Copperfield
Pride and Prejudice
Abel's Island
Mystery and Manners
Short stories of Eudora Welty
The Great Gatsby
Brideshead Revisited
A Severe Mercy (not really a novel, but...)

Wanting to reread:
More Faulkner
Tennessee Williams
Richard Wright
Shelby Foote
Walker Percy
My Antonia
To Kill a Mockingbird
Kristin Lavransdatter (if my lost copy ever shows up...)
Howard's End

But with all these good intentions, I sat up reading Matthew Pearl's latest, The Last Dickens, last night.