Eliot converted to Anglicanism in 1927. I was pleased to have known him after his conversion, not before. In Berkeley, at seminary, I enjoyed stories of those who had gone through a conversion experience, since conversions seemed to me to come from finally discovering who you are. Of course, at seminary I didn’t know much about this Jesus guy, but still.
Woolf had sentenced Eliot to literary and social death when he affronted her atheism. But some of Eliot’s verse I had found to be thoughtfully religious—“Journey of the Magi,” for example.
So I went back and I reread Eliot, and I realized that his next major poem after “The Waste Land” could be said to answer that poem’s frightening emptiness of the human condition. “The Hollow Men” could be said to lay out starkly the two existential choices before us humans. This was a new idea to me, and it was exciting. Just as my grade-school teacher had missed the point of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps critics had missed the bellwether of Eliot’s own future that he set before us in “The Hollow Men.”
Here are the closing lines of “The Hollow Men”—
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Perhaps the poet who wrote those lines knew in his heart that he had only two roads before him, between which he must choose. Perhaps Eliot stood there—in his yellow wood—and he looked down each road as far as he could, to where they bent in the undergrowth.
One road led to suicide; the other road led to God.
I’m happy that, by the time I knew him, Eliot had taken the one that made all the difference.
I would be surprised if there were one other student at Pacific School of Religion just then who was agonizing as I was agonizing over Eliot and Woolf. But then, that’s why my later doctorate is in religion and art and not in theology, or church history, or New Testament exegesis, or Greek.
So many, many were the attractions of the San Francisco Bay Area. As a seminary student I made close study of the history of Western visual and language arts in connection with its religious fundamentals. But beyond that, it was a sunny-skinned and a love-drenched California that my wife and I explored. How, indeed, was very much else to capture my attention when the competition on any given day might include celebrating Buddha’s birthday on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais with tambourines, flutes, topless women, and wine?
The poor old Episcopalians didn’t stand a chance.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Near the end of his existence, Scott Nearing became a friend of mine. My wife and I began to work for him and for his wife Helen when he was eighty-nine. Scott starved himself to death two weeks after his hundredth birthday. The willpower of the man!
Scott was, and remains, an evangelist of subsistence living, his fame resting on the fortuitous reissuing of his self-published book Living the Good Life at the very moment when my generation decided it wanted to go back to the land.
Our friendship was based on Scott’s intent to provide my wife and me with agricultural emancipation. We were in California, and Scott and Helen were in Maine, about ten miles from Undercliff. In our VW bug, my wife and I drove across the country about a dozen times, from one pole of our lives to the other. We knew Scott by composting with him, by hauling rocks with him, by building concrete-and-stone walls with him, by thinning scallions with him, by following his instruction on the strategic pruning of young tomato vines. Together, we all ate the plain, vegetarian food that Helen prepared, and we discussed what seemed to Scott to be plainly obvious truths.
Like some Zen master, when he moved, talked, or stayed still, Scott never seemed to be ahead of himself or behind himself—he was always precisely of the moment in which he was.
Scott and I might stand next to each other in the open door of his barn, companionably, neither one of us saying a word, but each one of us sharpening our scythes until the edges were razors, each one of us watching the cumulous summer sky as it darkened over the sea, each one of us eyeing the remaining three acres of hay yet to cut. Then Scott would utter that single guttural chuckle that was his laugh and repeat to me some aphorism that Trotsky had used with him back in the day.
Leon Trotsky!
I was accustomed to Dad knowing important literary names from the past, but here was a different realm in degrees of separation. Standing in Scott’s barn door in Maine, I was suddenly two degrees away from Leon Trotsky.
I don’t know the circumstances of Scott’s acquaintance with Trotsky, but during the 1920s and the early 1930s, when Scott was a socialist and then later a member of the American Communist Party, he was widely read internationally among radicals, and he traveled to the Soviet Union as a voice with an important following. Scott told me that he had thought hard about whether he should stay in the USSR, since it was the one place in the world where a true experiment was being tried regarding equal distribution of capital.
Helen was a water witch, and while Scott and I sharpened our scythes, she would be out near the roses with my wife teaching her how to make clouds disappear by the exercise of her will—for there were three acres of hay yet to cut, and to delay the rain was important. Helen was probably also telling her about her youthful and unsuccessful infatuation in India with the mystic and philosopher Krishnamurti. And the bees would bumble drunkenly in an excess of pollen.
Scott was famous for boasting to us that he had lost his last job in the 1920s. This always got the attention of the young acolytes who traipsed to Scott’s farm. Scott had been fired from his position as a professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania because he espoused pacifism and socialism. Since then, Scott had survived by speaking, writing, and subsistence farming, first in Vermont and then for twenty years in Maine.
The longer I knew Scott, though, the more I came to suspect that he was too much of an individualist to have thriven in Stalin’s workers’ paradise. Back in the United States, Scott could live exactly as he wanted to live and have the freedom to say whatever he was pleased to say to whomever he might attract. This was not how Stalin ran things in his own country.
My wife and I loved the deliberativeness of our socialist peasant existence at Scott and Helen’s Forest Farm. After four hours of hard physical labor each morning, we would sit in the sun in the alfresco eating area outside Helen’s kitchen door, and we would lunch on plain, raw fare, eating from wooden bowls with chopsticks or with rolled-up lettuce leaves as scoops. There were usually some eight or ten fellow travelers along with us. My wife and I were the permanent crew. We had the privilege of intimacy with Scott and Helen, while the passersby often got only dialectic. All the passersby were there to sit at Scott’s feet—young people who appeared daily to hear the oracle and to imagine themselves free of silly old capitalism, or at least free of silly old supermarket produce.
We were a cell. Now and then, as we worked the concrete and stone, a dark-colored, very plain sedan would find its way along the back road that led to Forest Farm. The car would squeak to a stop. With its windows rolled up tight, it would remain for about ten minutes. There were always two large, young men in the front seat. Photographs would be taken through the window glass.
Somewhere, in some file in the FBI, I imagine there are photographs of my wife and me, toiling for labor’s release. Actually what we were doing was helping to build Scott and Helen’s new house. Scott plodded stolidly about his tasks as the agents observed. Helen, more vivacious, made faces at the agents, or she gestured for them to come help us lug some monstrous stone. But the Midwestern farm boys—as we sneered at them—never did come to help. Later, crusty Scott would lecture us about the humorlessness of the American government and about its inevitable collapse.
Ours was a mild experience of the Communist paradise. For us, there were no barricades and no bombs. The sun shone down, and the rose hips reddened, and the lettuces were as big as bushel baskets. Helen was the char
mer. She was the salt that enlivened Scott’s stew. In time, I came to see Scott as the “poet” of his ideology. He thought poetry of my father’s type was without merit and told me so—with its spiritual intent and with its humanistic desire to delve man’s fallen condition. Dad’s poetry stood contrary to socialist materialism. It was the regularity of Scott’s actions, the precision of his pronouncements, and the Zen-like minimalism of his passions that made his life seem to me a created object, almost in an artistic sense. He was no Homer; his life told no high heroic tale. But it did have the neat, small perfection of haiku.
In August of one summer, Scott and Helen offered my wife and me thirty acres of their land—nice land too, with a water view and a gorgeous cedar swamp, filled, as Helen averred, with elves—for a mere $2,500. However, we must agree to live exactly according to Scott’s dictates during our first five years. Scott was old, and he wanted his legacy secured. Two couples before us had been offered similar pieces of land and had accepted them. We were to have the third large piece.
My wife and I thought hard about the Nearings’ offer. We went and stood in what was to be our own yellow wood. We searched out and found a good house site, high up, with thick forest protection from the northwestern winds, yet open to the warmer south. The gardens would need to be below, but water was available at the house’s height—there was a spring—and if we wanted to hear nothing at all except the shriek of an eagle, we could.
Were we truly fit for, and truly committed to, five years of subsistence living? Was our marriage strong enough to stand it? How would we weather the deepest winter months, when there would be very few people available for relief? What if we were to feel a tug from Reve one fall, before she was hauled out for the winter?
What if, one fall, when we ought to be stocking carrots and potatoes into the root cellar, we should come into a string of gorgeous days and desire, instead, to cruise? Scott would be against it. Scott and Helen’s new house at Forest Farm, the house we helped them build, looks down a cove and out to sea, westward across Penobscot Bay. Scott had never been out on the water, not once, during his twenty years on the coast of Maine. Why should he go out on the water, he questioned me briskly when I asked him about this—his landlocked state which seemed incomprehensible to me. Being out on the water was neither bread labor, since he was not a fisherman, nor was it avocation (writing, lecturing) or even recreation (sitting and thinking, or playing music). Therefore it did not fit in.
One Sunday, I snuck Helen out to Pond Island for a tour—“Don’t tell Scott,” she begged, only half humorously. This was her first time ever out on the bay in a boat, and there was real anxiety in her voice. At the end of our island ramble, Helen insisted that we must fill the skiff with stones suitable for wall building, so that if Scott should chance to discover our adventure, we would be able to prove that we had been doing bread labor nonetheless.
Now, when my wife’s and my workday was done at Forest Farm, most evenings we went home to Undercliff. There, the ethos was artistic and humane, the great yearning was toward the immaterial and where to go in the Reve tomorrow, and people enjoyed fun for fun’s sake.
The contrast with Forest Farm was too stark. In the end, my wife and I took the road that we took. We declined Scott’s offer to join him in the creation of his new subsistence paradise.
In time, my wife and I had our degrees, and we were both of us teaching at a Vermont prep school that had (and still has) very close ties with the US Ski Team. For several years, I saw my students racing on TV sometimes more often than I saw them in class, at least during Olympic events.
Later, my wife and I were not married any longer. Our community was tiny, halfway up a ski mountain in what’s called Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. It would be awkward for the two of us to remain cheek by jowl. Though I was dreadfully hurt by our divorce, I felt I had more options than she. I resigned from the school so she could remain.
I moved to Boston, roomed with a college pal, drove a cab, acquired seaman’s papers, hung around the hiring hall looking for a ship, waited for Vermont to finalize the divorce papers, and wrote as though I were powered by a demon.
But my pal was getting married, so pretty soon my roommate gig would come to an end. I was, of course, having nothing to do with women—forever. Or, well, maybe not forever but at least for five years. The good news was that my pal’s fiancée had a best friend who was smart and pretty—a sassy Barnard gal. She was just as much roped into the marriage preparation as I was. But that was okay, since everyone knew I was having nothing—ever—to do with a woman. So this friend of the bride and I could just enjoy each other’s company as we helped with the coming marriage.
That friend’s name was Channa. It still is.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I was in a muddle.
Did I want to become deeply involved with a new woman? No.
Did I want to become deeply involved with Channa? Incredibly—yes.
But what would all that lead to?
I was safer if I said no. I was safer if I held rigidly to my no. I was safer if I controlled everything around me. I was safer if I did not allow anything—and particularly any woman—to penetrate my lone self.
And yet now Channa had a claim on me. Her claim gripped me with extreme strength. Her claim gripped me with extreme strength from a direction I had not, until now, experienced the claim of a woman to come from.
Of course, Channa was beautiful. Of course, Channa was smart. Of course, Channa was funny. Of course, Channa was sassy. Of course—amazingly—Channa even liked to hear me talk. And she was, exotically, a Jew. But it was Channa’s character that had a claim on me. She was a woman of granite character, and her rock-solidness astonished me. She knew who she was without agonizing about it.
When her black hair was precisely curled, and she wore her backless dress, and she walked with me into a party, her sparkling eyes, her wide grin, and her loud, infectious laugh were instantly the center of the entertainment. And I—who knew by then that I had the inside track against her other suitors—I could stand back and admire this paragon.
One week, Channa and I went sailing. After a while, we anchored between Maine’s Round and McGlathery Islands, and rowed ashore to Round. We each explored the coastline in a different direction. In time, I came around to the island’s south end, which was a long slope of granite, against which the waves broke that day with gouts of spray.
When I could see the granite slope, I stopped. Channa was sitting there. She was utterly still. Her knees were up, and her arms were clasped around them, and her back was straight, and her gaze was one thousand miles long. She was as still as Moses might have been when, at long last, he was allowed his one sight of the Promised Land.
I watched Channa’s absorption for a time, and then I went and sat beside her on her rock. She acknowledged my presence by the touch of her shoulder against mine, but by no other act—no turning of her face toward me, no speech, no motion, no smile. For perhaps an hour, Channa allowed her profound silence to continue, which relieved me, for we were both by then subsumed entirely within the presence of that for which we both yearned.
Wonderful, that hour.
When the time passed, and when her body language showed that she had returned and was ready to talk, I turned to this beautiful woman, and with my most soulful eyes, I indicated the totality of my love for her by breathing, “Being with you is like being alone.”
Instantly, there came that great Channa smile, that great Channa laugh, that great Channa grasping of the whole of the moment, instantly, and getting her comment just right.
“Dikkon, I hope what you meant to say is that being with me is as good as being alone.”
And of course I had meant as good as.
Ever since then, in our private language, Round Island has stood for complete joy in the presence of the holy.
Later during that cruise, we were anchored in Southwest Harbor off Mount Desert Island. I was tense and trying not to show i
t. I had something that my heart was pressuring me to say. That something that my heart was pressuring me to say was a thing that my head was keeping me from saying.
I was a basket case.
We were sitting across from each other in the cockpit. Channa’s eyes were lasers and her lips were thin.
“What?”
“Isn’t this just beautiful?” I gestured around. “I love this.”
“What, Dikkon?”
“Nothing. Just, I love being here with you.”
“Dikkon, what?”
I stood up. I stalked to the wheel and rattled it a little. I looked up at the rigging as though to police for a loose line. I took a breath. I put my hands up on the furled mainsail and bent my body forward in an arch. I let out the breath in a whoosh.
I put my hands in my pockets and stalked forward and stepped over the coaming of the forward hatch and stepped down onto the top step of the ladder and turned to face the stern and braced my elbows out on each side of the cabin top.
My eyes caught Channa’s. Brighter lasers.
I looked away.
Then I looked back. Then I blurted, “What if I say that I want to marry you?”
Time screeched to a stop. My head hummed. My lungs had squeezed shut. I could scarcely see Channa’s eyes through the fog across my own.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know!”
Coward, my head exploded. Coward! Coward! Coward!
Dad and me—each of us a basket case when it comes to marriage proposals!
Nine months later, Channa and I married. The ceremony was held at the Wellesley Inn, a secular setting, though our vows were heard by an Episcopal priest who had originally studied to be a rabbi—so we checked off both boxes for our three living grandmothers.
In the 1970s, we who knew that there are dozens of religions in the world reacted to this fact in opposite ways. Some concluded that since there were so many religions, none of them could be true. Therefore, the sensible thing to do—the enlightened thing—was to set religion aside and to declare for secularism. Others concluded that, since there were so many religions, there must be a truth toward which they were all striving. Therefore, the sensible thing to do—the humble thing—was to declare for God . . . and to await further instruction.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 14
