A Southern Family - Godwin

I fully intend to pay attention to those spiritual books waiting to be read for Lent, but I’ve been distracted too much by a couple everlasting tomes by Gail Godwin, A Southern Family and A Mother and Two Daughters. My sister was the one who inspired me to pick up one of her books, but she read something different. I read A Southern Family first. The plot held my attention, but I kept thinking I should put it down. It’s long. I didn’t really love the characters. It has a sort of romance novel sweepingness about it, almost feels as if it seems to think it is a better book than it is. But each time I was ready to dump it in the library return bag, I’d come across a passage like the conversation between a couple of the central characters, Clare Quick, a novelist, and her best friend Julia, a history professor, that starts out being about Clare’s family but turns into a discussion of power. After talking about fame, wealth, beauty, and perseverance, Julia comments, “There is always, I suppose, the power base of a secret, inviolate, spiritual life.” Ahh, this could get good I thought.

That conversation ends with the two friends admiring the flight of a hawk who casts a shadow, which seems to presage the tragedy awaiting the two friends later that day. Clare’s brother Theo shoots himself and his girlfriend in front of his girlfriend’s son. The rest of the book revolves around the way the various Quick family members make sense of this tragedy and make judgments of each other. The narrative perspective switches from character to character, so the reader is given different insights into the family members and sees how complex their responses are compared to the judgments of the others, but I ended up feeling unattached to any of them. They suffer from what Clare notices about characters in a book she’s reading about southern families: they have “a stubborn loyalty to [their] sadness. … - a sort of elegiac mourning for the loss of a world that never had been … They were in love with their sadness more than with one another. Their sadness had become their religion and their art: it provided, as music to a dance, the tempo and structure of their lives.”


Perhaps the character I liked the most was Julia, Clare’s friend and subject of one of her books. Julia leaves a promising job, and a wealthy husband, to attend to duty by coming home to take care of her dying mother and then her lonely, aging father. She is able to escape becoming a bitter and mean old woman by “her historian’s awareness” of all that goes on around her, including “the striking aesthetic deterioration” going on around her town, as well as in families like the Quicks.

Another part of what kept me reading was interest in the southern culture. This book came out in 1987, well before “Southern lit” was used to describe books about Sweet Potato Queens, food made with butter and the help that made it, and sassy ladies with plastic surgery, so it draws on the “southern lit” tradition surrounding tortured families whose influence is lost and their dying civilization in which duty and nobility are no longer admired virtues. The influx of suburban tract homes and the lessening of the distance between the “hill people” and the people in town in this small Tennessee community seemed familiar, similar to the changes experienced in the small midwestern town where I grew up. In fact the setting seemed more reminiscent of that Midwestern town than it did of the southern town where I live now, although I more than once have heard politically incorrect remarks, sometimes startlingly off-color ones, about people of different races or who live in the country here.


Also familiar was the run-down cottage Clare rents on an island two states over and invites all the family to visit. Clare looks through all the books and photos of the owners in an effort to know them. My own family used to rent a lake house for a week or 10 days every summer up in Michigan. Most of the cottages’ shelves were stocked with Reader’s Digest Condensed books and a few romances. One had a stash of magazines and comics from the 60s and an old guest book in which our names were repeated over the years. We could copy the appreciative comments of other guests and think ourselves creative.

At the lake house, everything gets wrapped up: the family members are able to come to an acceptable peace and move on with life. Clare and her mother share dream stories. The mother is able to see something beautiful in the fake flowers left at son’s grave by his hill country wife. The father survives eye surgery and seems to have a new perspective on life. Clare has a new story to begin.


Early in the book, Clare’s dead brother had criticized her for writing books that ended with everyone happy and successful. Clare, sensitive to this criticism, threw out the book she was working on when her brother dies, because it is the sort of thing she thought she ought to be writing. Her lover, Felix, says at one point, “An artist has found his true subject, I think, when he dramatizes the truth he can no longer escape rather than the illusions he has been longing to make true.” So perhaps Godwin wants us to believe that Theo’s death somehow liberates Clare from the desire to free herself from her family, and instead to try to look at each one more as an individual she accepts.


So perhaps that’s the Lenten lesson to be drawn from this book: Love others as they are as you love yourself as you are, instead of trying to make people into who you want them to be.


The theme of A Mother and Two Daughters is similar, but I have to admit I skimmed this one. I was just going to peek into it a little to see if it were worth reading, since I am a mother of two daughters and a daughter of a mother of two daughters and am interested in sisterly relations. I read enough to want to find out what happened to the characters, but also enough to not want to spend days reading it. Instead I spent a couple hours breezing through the pages, but didn’t find any passages that made me want to linger. I’m sure it’s a likable book for someone in the right mood, but it struck me as low on substance, high on relativism.


Now I am on to something meatier: I started the book about biblical figures by the local priest, am keeping up with the Magnificat Lenten Companion (kept in a convenient spot in the W.C.), and finally started A Winter’s Tale, which may be sidetracked by an attempt to assimilate as much Western Lit from the Norton Anthology as I can before I start a new class next week. After suffering from an oppressive sense of failure at the end of last semester when I wasn’t offered another class at the community college, I have been given a second chance. This class is a condensed version at the Navy base and meets two nights a week for 3 hours. I don’t have time to dither about what selections to read or to fret much about my shortcomings. I’m hoping the literature will speak for itself.

Blooming

Spring peas in live oak leaves. Time to rake

One of the last camellias

Welcome azaleas amid saw tooth palms!



One of my favorite parts of Spring in the South: wisteria



Loveless hearts shall love tomorrow, hearts that have loved shall love anew,

Spring is young now, spring is singing, in the spring the world first grew;

In the spring the birds are wedded, in the springtime true hearts pair,

Under the rain of her lover's kisses loose the forest flings her hair.

Now in the shadows of the woodland She that binds all

true loves' vows,
She shall build them bowers tomorrow of Her own green myrtle-boughs

There Diana high enthroned on her lovers lays her law -
Loveless hearts shall love tomorrow, hearts that have loved shall love once more.

-From The Vigil of Venus translated by F. L. Lucas



Lime buds





Spring also brings these guys to town.

 

Their roaring motors are bringing everyone out into the sun.



Happy all the time

Not too long ago Pentimento shared an excerpt from The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin and linked to an article that mentioned her early death of heart failure. Her name jumped to mind when I was at the library the other day, so I picked up Happy All the Time, which happens to be the book reviewed in the article, with more detail and eloquence than what you are going to read here. Colwin had published 10 books before she died in 1992; this one was written in the 70s. It is the story of two distant cousins who are close friends. They meet two smart and attractive women and get married, and the four of them become great pals.

I kept waiting for the unhappiness to set in. Surely the title is meant to be ironic, isn’t it?  For some reason, I had it in my head, wrongly I reconfirmed after finishing the book, that Colwin had committed suicide, so I expected that the characters were waiting for disaster or betrayal, or both.


But nothing really bad actually happens. These people meet, become attracted to each other, eventually allow themselves to fall in love, have a baby, struggle a bit at work, and lead lives of understated contentment. They suffer a little from jealousy and misunderstanding. They find being in love a bumpy road. But soon enough they forgive each other and go out to dinner. They meet interesting and rude people and have clever conversations. They drink and eat well and work at meaningful jobs and maintain a close friendship.

When I finished I wondered if I missed something? I liked the book, although the characters seemed a bit opaque and almost too clever. The story is devoid of sentimentality; the characters purposefully avoid it. One of the characters, Guido, is philosophical and usually thinks before acting, but meets a girl, courts her, and marries her in short order. His best friend Vincent usually acts on whims, but when he falls in love finally with the right girl, he can’t make decisions and second guesses himself until he is overcome with love for his young lady and has to act. The main characters experience a little growth, but minor; they are mostly static characters.


So the story is about how life just happens, a series of small dramas, without being the big drama we expect and perhaps hope for.  Colwin presents a believable and clever tale about the capacity of love and friendship to give meaning to life. The reviewer in the linked article, Jonathan Yardley, compares her work to Jane Austen's for her keenly observed portrait of domestic life.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal has an article about overrating happiness. In recent studies, sociologists have found that people who are mostly happy but have some stress from the responsibilities of life are usually more content and healthier than people who chase after perfect happiness. In fact the researchers even found that people who had the kind of stress in their life that comes from working at a meaningful job, or raising children, or maintaining long term relationships, had lower rates of Alzheimer’s, because in the long run, that stress from responsibility came from meaningful work or goal-seeking that contributed to feelings of "eudaimonic well-being." People who question their happiness and intentionally seek it typically are unhappier than these people that suffer a little bit in pursuit of love and goals. (the Lenten lesson from today's WSJ ...)

An interesting point for a naval gazer like myself. My life seems to alternate between periods of extreme business and periods of relative aimlessness. As my sister has pointed out, part of mothering is being available, even if you aren’t needed at the moment. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t be setting some goals, in order to move beyond fulltime mothering and parttime occasional volunteer work to something more defined, whether it be going back to school or working on a project, or getting serious about getting back into shape so I can compete in a triathlon in Guam. And then a situation like yesterday arises: I thought I had the whole day to work on various little projects, but a sick child called home and friends dropped in and a ride to gymnastics fell through, and meanwhile my husband is in Alabama for two weeks. So it is good I was available yesterday. More on this. Because now I’ve got to move on to one of my responsibilities.

The Present Moment

"Every moment of life is like God saying, "Look, I know you messed up the last moment, but here's a new one." Every moment you breathe, God's power envelops you and sustains you in existence. So every moment, no matter what you did in the last one, no matter if you were sinful, mean, impatient, unkind, or caustic, you have a fresh start in this new moment. Every day, every instant of your life is brand-new -- you make it old by living in the past. And you make it a dream world by living in the future.

"... We have to learn to live in the Present Moment. We have to ask God: "What are You calling me to do now in this Present Moment? Not yesterday or tomorrow, but right now. God's will is manifested to us in the duties and experiences of the Present Moment. We have only to accept them and try to be like Jesus in them.

"You know, when we look at God and we wonder why we are not closer to Him, and not like Jesus, we wonder why we were impatient yesterday and impatient today. We work so hard to overcome this weakness, this fault, and yet we don't do it. Then we keep praying: "Lord, give me patience," "Lord, give me love," "Lord, give me courage," "Give me endurance." "Give me, give me, give me." God gives, but you're not at home."


For Lent, I am going to make an extra effort to pay heed to these words of Mother Angelica's, which are collected by Raymond Arroyo in Mother Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality, one of those books that has been sitting in my stack since my mother gave it to me two or three Christmases ago.  I accuse my kids of being grabby and greedy, but I am just as quick to beg God for graces like Mother Angelica points out, but not wait around to receive them. Or sometimes I am too worried about the details of what is going to happen next week to notice what gifts God is handing out in the present moment. Then those details I fretted about fall into place and are forgotten, or fall out of place and are rued.  In the meantime, I have neglected to pay attention to what is in front of my face, most importantly, the people milling around me in the kitchen who want attention and love that distract me from my plans.  So for the next forty days, I'm going to try to worry less about details that I have little control over anyway, and practice asking God "What are you calling me to now."

*I am also going to look up Brother Lawrence's book The Practice of the Presence of God which inspired Mother Angelica to preach about the presence of God in the Present Moment.

Beads and cake and resolutions

Watch out for flying beads!

I just licked the last bite of hip cake* off my fingers before uploading these photos.  We've cleaned up most of the dishes from our impromptu Mardi Gras party, and the recycling has been taken out.  We used to host a Mardi Gras party in Virginia because I could never get my act together to have a Christmas party, but I never thought I'd have one here, seeing as we're Yankees and all. But we live close enough to the parade route in town to walk to the parade, so I invited some friends to park at our house and walk, although my husband informed me that most people don't consider a mile a short walk.  So to compensate, we fed everyone jambalaya, brownies, and hip cakes. It was an "eat what you're giving up" party, so we also had chips, soda, beer and wine, cookies, and some people under age 10 had gum. 

Showing off the loot and eating moon pies.
All of these beads are now in a bag to be given back to a friend who has a float.

It was also a happy birthday party for my oldest, whose actual fourteenth birthday is tomorrow. He has grown about 6 inches this year, and did not ask for Legos.



He started out like this.

I'm still formulating my Lenten resolutions, but among them will be giving up sweets and talking about getting old, avoiding mulling on regrets, and reading some of the books I bought last year and never read. At the top of the pile are a couple of local authors, one a priest from Malayasia on mission here who has written about the saints and the other a man who lived with the homeless for a year.  At confession the other day, the priest told me to sign up to take Communion to shut-ins, so I suppose I have to do that. (Does that count as a spiritual and a corporal act of mercy?) And that same priest has organized small group study circles at our parish and assigned people to certain groups, so I will be going to one of those. This priest is very proactive, but also much loved, so he doesn't come off as pushy.

Now I am going to sleep off my sugar coma before Mass tomorrow morning.

*Recipe for hip cakes:
-Heat oven to 350
-Combine one box yellow cake mix with 1 stick melted butter and 1 egg. Mix well and pat into 9x13 pan.
-Combine 8 oz cream cheese, 1 box powdered sugar, and 2 eggs. Mix well and spread on top of cake mix.
-Bake about 45 minutes until set and golden on edges.
-Eat one for each hip.

What I learned at Bible study

What do you say when someone you barely knows tells you about her cheating husband? Is “I’m sorry” enough? That's all I could manage when a lady I had just met told me about her husband's affair.  I didn't have any advice to give, a little like Lucas in Go Down, Moses, although lately marriage has been a topic of reading material and conversation, and I don't think she wanted any.

This confession about adultery occurred at an ecumenical Bible study I’ve been attending for the last few weeks. The group is rather large, and the material, a study by Priscilla Shirer, Beth Moore, and Kay Anderson, the three big Lifeway ladies, requires about an hour to get through, so time for personal sharing is limited. But plenty is shared in the few minutes available.

I initially wasn’t sure if this group was right for me. The women all seemed familiar with the authors and were able to quote Scripture verses when they offered responses to the study questions. And they are almost all Southern Belle stylish: jeans, high heels, hi-lights in the hair. (Except the ones over 65, who are graciously stylish in a mature fashion.) But appearances aside, the other ladies are a sincere group, full of a desire to share in each other’s sufferings and provide shoulders to cry on, because it seems everyone has a sob story to tell.

I always leave each week amazed at the number of broken people out there, disguised by smiles, stylish clothes, and a gaggle of friends.

First we pray for the sick, the list of which keeps getting longer each week: an aunt with cancer, a cousin with heart disease, a baby hospitalized with a blood infection, an alcoholic son, a co-worker with leukemia. My own extended family list includes family members with heart disease, ALS, MS, multiple miscarriages, depression, joint problems, and other age related disabilities.

Then there are the infidelities: husbands, children, family members who have turned away. Cases of abuse. Carnal sins of the past. Abortions.

When the lady sitting next to me told me her husband was having an affair, she made an interesting observation, saying, “I used to be one of those people who would blame the wife. But now I know that this is spiritual warfare. I would’ve thought my husband would’ve sooner had relations with a dead deer than another woman, but his heart has turned away from God. It’s not about her or me, but him and God.”

And so she prays for him, and we pray for her and her kids.

All of these stories that are shared remind me again and again how blessed I am. Tomorrow I could lose all of these glories: health, children, husband, life. One of the most memorable bits from this Bible study came from the section by Priscilla Shirer, who quoted Charles Hummel, saying, "Don't let the urgent things crowd out the important things."

Last Sunday’s gospel from Matthew has been relevant this week, at this Bible study, while subbing at the elementary for a teacher whose father is dying, while answering phone calls at St. Vincent de Paul. Who doesn't need to be told, "Do not worry about your life,what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  . . . Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.  Sufficient for a day is its own evil.”

This wronged woman, who is able to get herself up, dressed, and out about town, seems to be taking these words to heart and coping with her husband's infidelity pretty well without additional advice from me or the Bible study leaders.  What could measure up to the gospel?


So I haven't memorized any new scripture verses while attending this Bible study, but these stories of woe confirm the gospel reminder not to fret about what is lacking, but rather rejoice in what is present.

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.