by Wendy Welch
At that age, injustices look easily changeable; if the adults only knew how silly they were acting, they’d stop. It was our duty, when we grew up, to act more sensibly and end this silly unfair nonsense. Anne Frank wrote something very similar in her diary, some forty years before Steinbeck expanded my sight line.
When I finished Wrath, I understood three new ideas: America, let alone the world, was bigger than I’d ever imagined, but still looked a lot like high school; there were other people who thought things should be fairer than they were, and I could join them in working to make life that way; and classic literature was awesome. Awesome in the classic sense: awe-inspiring and awful. Good-bye, teen pop lit, hello, Hemingway, Miller, even Chaucer and Voltaire once I got used to the language. What a wonderful, horrible, ambiguous world!
The Grapes of Wrath marked the end of childhood and the beginning of a lifelong passion I couldn’t even put a name to then, although its slickest moniker has become “social justice.” I thank Mr. Beekman (the lit teacher) for introducing me to it. But this story has a coda, because the book—or rather, the play—hit me again some twenty years later. A call went out from the theater department at a nearby college: volunteer musicians were sought for a production of The Grapes of Wrath to be staged during the fall term. A customer who knew our musical background brought it to my attention, and I raced to Jack with the flyer in my hand.
“This book changed my life! We have to do this!” I babbled, then fired an e-mail off to the theater faculty. That’s how we met Dr. Gary Crum, executive director of an organization that recruited medical professionals to underserved areas (to wit, where we live). He played concertina, banjo, and harmonica, and also responded to the e-mail. Gary, Jack, and I had a blast creating the music for Wrath, in large part because Michael, Michael, and Ben, the faculty members running the show, gave us a free hand to embed folk music throughout the production. It wasn’t a musical; we just aided with mood and ambiance, plus scene openings and closings. It seemed like neo-heaven.
Michael is an unusually nurturing director, one who sees his job as getting the kids to understand more than to act. Most of them were just a couple of years older than I’d been when Wrath interrupted my cozy little life; watching them figure some things out as practices progressed rekindled hope that the next generation might make a few more changes than mine had managed. And on opening night, when Gary, Jack, and I stood up to sing, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore,” twenty years of meekness, patience, and anger turned our voices into melodic steel. The theater students didn’t so much perform as explode; they knew what the play was about. A student in the audience said later, “I cried four times. Y’all just changed my life.”
I hope so, kid. For all of us, I hope so.
Green Shadows, White Whale
Actually, almost any collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories would be among my favorites. In short spurts of fiction interspersed with essays and bits of memoir, Shadows details Bradbury’s career as a young screenwriter working on Moby Dick under the dubious care of legendary director John Huston. Bradbury has the most interesting way of revealing meaning by obscuring it; his characters wrap three times around human nature, but just as you believe yourself lost in a maze of descriptive symbolism, the angel choir sings and lights you home. Baby, could this guy write. And he mostly mined his own life.
Although it would be hard to choose a favorite of all Bradbury’s stories, one stands out as a recurring theme in my life, its warning subtle yet clear. Bradbury wrote about a man (but it was him, on assignment with Huston) being in Dublin and hearing a street beggar playing her harp on one of the three famous bridges. He gave her money and complimented her incredible playing—and nearly wrecked everything, because he made her aware of what she was doing. Her fingers fumbled, she lost her nonchalant confidence, and it wasn’t until he fled in horror at what he’d done that she regained a deft, unexamined touch. Bradbury learned then not to ask too many questions, a lesson that threads through his beautiful, bizarre story collections.
Sometimes people talk to writers and storytellers about “talent” and “charisma” and “learning the craft.” Humans have always wanted to find the line, to bottle (and then sell) the difference between that little magic spark and a lot of bloody hard work to master an art form. I’m all for anyone learning new skills, and as Edison once said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it arrives dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Still, with those caveats in mind, perhaps it doesn’t do to lean too far over when peering into the deep well of creativity. One of the muses might sneak up from behind and push you headlong down the shaft.
Homeland
Rosina Lippi (this little paperback’s author) may not think the following anecdote cute, but I picked up a dog-eared copy of her work for ten pence at a library sale in Britain one day, on the basis that the cover looked interesting. If I didn’t like it, it could go to the used book store in Milnathort and nary a word needed to be said about my extravagance. I curled up in an armchair and opened the book that weekend, when Jack was out for the day with a friend.
Falling in love is a sneaky business; you start reading, and then you look up and it’s two hours past dinnertime and the light is failing in the room and the dog is whining insistently because you haven’t let him out and your husband is home from his excursion wondering why you look as though you’ve been crying.
What a beautiful book this is. Patricia Hampl, another writer whose work I admire, wrote in her memoir The Florist’s Daughter, “Nothing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life.” Lippi grasped the lives of not just one but a dozen modest women in the mountains between Austria and Italy, living as quietly as circumstances and world wars would allow through the twentieth century. The book tells the story of successive generations of women in one tiny village—how they lived, died, loved, coped—in a removed fashion, with such gracious yet loving distance to the writing that you could almost wonder afterward why you cared.
Because you do care. Very much. Lippi makes her characters so real you can smell their milk, sweat, and perfume, and she does it with an economy of words bordering on magic. She depicts the changes that time, custom, even the coming of electricity make on the women and their way of life, simply by mentioning them in passing while talking about something else; it’s as if the part she’s ignoring is the aspect of their lives most sharply in focus.
Briefly, before returning to the States from Britain, I ran two book clubs for a library in England. Despite my best marketing efforts, one remained small, at one point dropping to just two other members: a young man of Pakistani descent and a British woman nearing retirement. Finding books that interested both would be tricky, I thought, but the pair seemed happy to take it in turns that we three should each suggest a book to read together. When my month came, I passed out copies of Homeland, apologizing to Hamza as I did so: “Perhaps it’s more of a girl’s book, but it does have some interesting social history to it, chronicles the wars and all.”
Hamza read the book’s jacket blurb, then shot me an old-fashioned look. “Is this Steel Magnolias set in some remote village?” he asked, and Irene, our other member, guffawed. It turned out she had already read the book and loved it, but despite my pleas that I would retract this and choose another before we went home, she insisted that we keep to the agreement and read it together.
“I do want Hamza to try it, but rather agree that it might be more female-centric and therefore inaccessible,” she said. (She was a legal wizard and talked like that as a matter of course.) “But I remember enjoying it very much, and want to read it again.”
Home they went, Lippi’s slim volume tucked under an arm. Next month, Hamza was last to arrive, so late that Irene joked, “I believe he might be fed up with us. Perhaps we should have read something more testosterone-laden.”
Just then Hamza breezed in, took his seat, and pulled out his copy. “See this book?” he growled, holding it by one corner a
nd smashing his finger against the cover until his knuckle turned white. His face dissolved into a smile. “I loved it. The writing is gorgeous, but that’s not all. I read it twice, once for me, and once translating it for my mum. She grew up in a mountain village in Pakistan, and the stories she told me were a lot like this, that whole passage-of-time, mother-daughter-aunt-sister holding-it-together feminine mystique stuff. My mum loved it, and she probably loved it differently than I did, but I cried my way through each chapter.” He set the book down and fixed us with a baleful glare. “And if you repeat that to anyone, I’ll deny it.”
Yeah, that whole passage-of-time, mother-daughter-aunt-sister thing does me in, too. Huzzah for Rosina Lippi, telling a simple story with beautiful words that make such different people feel the same thing.
I Capture the Castle
Better known for creating The 101 Dalmatians, Dodie Smith also penned the first “teen novel.” Literature professors ever since have been bemoaning either how little credit she receives for this contribution, or the fact that she made it in the first place. (Some lit profs look like real curmudgeons until you get to know them. And some really are.) Castle pioneered the genre that would detail the angst and anguish of being a young adult in love, telling the story from the ingenue’s baffled-yet-brave point of view. “I love. I have loved. I will love.” That has to be one of the greatest literary endings of all time. Smith’s poetic phrase gets quoted again and again without people realizing the original source.
I gave a copy of Castle to a friend’s daughter when she turned thirteen. Mature for her age and able to see right through much of what passes for relationship advice among young women today, Maeve as child-becoming-woman reminded me of Castle’s narrator Cassandra. Questioning, probing, trying hard to believe in themselves and to face down the outside world without drying up inside, young women stumble forward in life, chins up, eyes wide open, hearts all too often lying vulnerably on their sleeves. Go, girls. Go forth and conquer! You have been, will be, and are loved.
Portraits of “The Whiteman”
Keith Basso isn’t necessarily a well-known author outside folklore and anthropology circles, which is a shame because his book has so much to say about human relationships. Basso describes very different groups of people seeking human connections across invisible boundaries—or maybe, just maybe, he describes the ways in which these groups subtly keep those invisible barriers up with language and humor. That’s one of the aspects I love about this book: he doesn’t tell you what to think, just lays a whole lot of interesting facts and plausible observations out in the sun for you to have a look at.
Basso analyzes magnanimous behavior on one side viewed as condescension from the other, the classic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the dominant and the subservient. He does it by recording jokes. In a nutshell, Basso, as a young and green anthropologist, was engaged in some run-of-the-mill fieldwork in Cibecue, Arizona, among Western Apaches, and left his tape recorder behind, running. (“Did he do it on purpose?” will remain one of those great literature questions of the centuries, alongside “Does Faust love Gretchen?” and “Would Elizabeth have learned to love Mr. Darcy without first seeing his manor?”) He captured a Native man acting like a white anthropologist in a humorous impromptu sketch: shaking hands with everyone, speaking too loudly, asking how much things cost, making personal inquiries about health and family matters. Listening to his covert recording later, Basso realized he’d gotten what Robert Burns called the greatest gift: “to see ourselves as others see us.” So he started over with his fieldwork, and the result is this book.
The simultaneous humor and depth of its concepts are easy to grasp because we’ve experienced them, whether we gave them an anthropological name or not. How do we relate to people who are racially, ethnically, socially, educationally, idealistically, or economically different from us? Basso uses only one example, the “whiteman” and the Western Apaches. He is not trying to universalize power relationships, only to record a joking and speech tradition among a certain people group.
Still, his writing all but smacks you in the face. Perhaps the book’s biggest effect is in the questions it does not ask: Can racism flow in two directions, or only from those with the most power toward those with the least? Is it possible that a larger group can covertly expect a smaller to learn its customs and social norms by pretending to be intellectually interested in the “quaint traditions” of the smaller? Just what does it mean to be white in America today? And, by proxy, what makes something funny when it happens between two people who don’t share common biological ancestry, but who have grown up side by side, each believing the other did wrong? Just what is entitlement, really?
This is neither a simple book nor even a well-known one, but its concepts are ubiquitous in our lives and reading it challenges unexamined complicity with such ideas.
Raney
Clyde Edgerton’s novelization of the first two years, two months, and two days of a Southern/Northern mixed marriage has you laughing out loud even as it breaks your heart. Although his other novels are funnier and sometimes sweeter, Edgerton gets into a young married girl’s mind in a way that has readers checking again and again to make sure he really was a guy.
Wally Lamb accomplished the same feat in She’s Come Undone, but Raney is so culturally spot-on, it makes Southern readers giggle even as we say, “Ouch!” He touches on racism, sexism, ageism, and the rude-stupid fight between North and South so very deftly through the eyes of one small, nonthreatening woman that you don’t really realize how challenging it all is until you close the book on its last enigmatic paragraph.
Then the words follow you around as you go through your heretofore unexamined motions of daily Southern living, catching yourself in an action to wonder why you’re behaving as you are. It is not nearly as passive as it deceptively seems, this Raney book. Neither are any of his others, particularly Walking Across Egypt. If you don’t want to reexamine your cultural norms, don’t get started on Edgerton. Yeah, he’s funny, but a sting rests in the tale. It’s just that you don’t notice while you’re reading because you’ve split a gut laughing.
A Tale of Two Cities
Of course anyone who spends two hours a week at something called Needlework Night is going to love a novel with the world’s most famous knitter in it. Even people who have never read A Tale of Two Cities know about “that lady who makes lists with her knitting,” Thérèse Defarge. Madame Defarge kept a record of which aristocrats were accused of what crimes before the revolution began, and of gossip that might lead to where they were hiding afterward. Knitters can’t help but reference her on a regular basis, along with that other famous women’s needlework story, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell. (That’s the one where the women realize a wife murdered her husband after looking at her quilting, which contains clues the women discern but the investigating men miss.)
Still, Two Cities has much more than a vengeful knitter to recommend it. Scholars have been saying for decades that this book is unlike anything else Charles Dickens wrote. It is, for him, brief. Its themes are vast but the writing tight. Its predictability only adds to its appeal. Two Cities breaks just about every rule of good fiction, yet gets away with it. And it has a brilliant opening (you remember: best of times, worst of times) and tearjerker closing (far, far better thing I’ve done, etc.). They’ll live forever.
I read it in high school, after Grapes of Wrath turned me on to the classics. I thought I knew what it was about. (Heck, in high school, didn’t we all think we knew just about everything?) I read it again after taking Western Civilization in college, when the French Revolution was not a romantic nebulous concept but one in a series of fierce history lessons, proving just how fast the pendulum could swing between the powerful and the powerless. (English folksinger Vin Garbutt has a thought-provoking song on this theme: “When oppressed becomes oppressor, when the best comes the worst, when the meek become the mighty and the blest take on the
curse…” You can look it up. It’s not a cheery little number, so it doesn’t get sung that often.)
The French Revolution is just one more example of how justice denied becomes the foundation for another generation of justice denied, in the same way that meanness begets meanness. Dickens knew that in this book, although critics still argue whether his other works delved to the same depth of the human condition. Yet in the middle of it all one flawed antihero becomes someone generations of students have learned to admire, if not imitate.
Lest this all seem too horribly earnest, however, let me repeat: Two Cities is a ripping good read.
Till We Have Faces
C. S. Lewis has written many classics, including the Chronicles of Narnia stories, the Perelandra trilogy, and Mere Christianity. Of them all, his personal favorite was Faces. It’s the retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, and its explorations of what love is and does are profound. He pulls no punches in examining the heights and depths of what we have decided to call love for God, for family, for country, and for fellow humans. And he can hit bloody hard.
My favorite part—although it struck me silent the first time I read it—is when Oraul, the narrator, finally gets to the council of gods where she can petition for the return of her beloved little sister, the Psyche character. But when she speaks to them, she finds that what she has been demanding all along is not Psyche’s redemption from a “monster” husband, nor even her well-being, but that she, Oraul, be the primary source of love in Psyche’s life. And that moment devastates her into this speech:
