“You’ve got to get used to waking up through the night,” Mrs. Willy said. “That’s the Lord’s way of getting you used to being up with the baby in the night.”
“Does the Lord carry a meal sifter?” Christie asked.
“Why, what do you mean?”
“Oh, sometimes I can’t tell witches from devils,” Christie said. “Reckon it was witches that made our mule go crazy last summer? And what about that swarm of bees that got after Wad one spring?” Christie paused to tighten a hairpin. She cast a glance at the ceiling. “And that he-cow that busted out of his stall last week? Witches?”
“Christianna Wheeler!” said Mrs. Willy disapprovingly, realizing she was being mocked. “If you act ill towards people, that baby will have a ill disposition.”
“I can handle any witches that get in my house,” said Christie, pushing her iron forcibly up the back of the shirt.
“Well, Christie, when you went to camp meeting down yonder at Reelfoot, Alma said you got enough religion to get you through to your time. I hope so.”
Christie didn’t want to think about Reelfoot. There was a lull, while the fire in their voices died down into embarrassment. Christie finished the shirt and lifted a sheet from the wash basket.
Mrs. Willy said, “You need some new domestic. That sheet’s plumb full of holes.”
“This sheet’s old. I’m aiming to tear it up into diapers.”
Christie was glad when the woman left. She made Christie nervous, watching her iron and waiting for a crumb of personal detail. Christie wouldn’t tell Mrs. Willy about the particular sensations—the way the blood flowed, the way all those creatures turned somersets in her stomach, the way she jolted awake. One night she had awakened after dreaming that her little sister Susan was alive again. In the dream, Nannie had been tugging on her nipple, but Nannie was Susan. The rhythm of the sucking had words, like words to a song. One of Susan’s first words was moo-moo, her word for milk. Awake, Christie remembered the time her mother made a pinafore for Susan, starching the ruffles and working the fine lace. But the dogs tore it off of Susan, chewing it to tatters. Mama had worked on that pinafore for most of one winter.
A few days after Mrs. Willy’s visit, James came in unexpectedly from the barn, slamming the kitchen door. He said, “I heard you was nasty to Mrs. Willy.”
Christie was standing at the stove, stirring cream corn. “Mrs. Willy?” She turned away from James and reached for a bowl on the shelf. Her heart pounded.
James said, “Her sister’s telling how you laughed at her and hurt her feelings.”
Christie set the bowl on the table and dumped the corn in it. She said, “Some people like to talk.”
For a second James’s face looked as hard as clay dirt baked in the sun. “We have to live with all kinds,” he said. “You can’t just laugh to a person’s face, Chrissie.”
Christie bent her head down. She was conscious of her swollen breasts, her own, not his or anyone else’s. James had never talked to her like this.
“When we moved here, we promised we was going to get along with everybody,” he said. “You remember that.”
Christie nodded. She was tired. She put her hands on her stomach, and she felt it move. James rarely got upset with her. He usually turned everything into a joke, he was so easy.
“Since you and Mandy went down to Reelfoot, it’s like you come back a different woman,” James said. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Christie. You’re making my heart ache.”
She turned, and her skirt tugged against her middle.
James’s face softened a little then. “That baby’s coming sooner than we thought,” he said, touching her stomach. He seemed shocked to realize her girth.
In bed that night, Christie couldn’t get comfortable. She felt monstrously heavy, as if with the weight of opinion. When she got up to relieve herself, she took the pot into the kitchen and tried to hit the side to muffle the sound. Afterward, she reached inside the warming box of the stove for a chicken wing. She gnawed the chicken, then searched for a piece of liver, the grease congealed with the crust. In the dark, she nibbled like a mouse, as quietly as possible, chewing breathlessly. She felt better. She heard Nannie stir on the pallet.
But the pregnancy dragged on, like the winter. Her mother couldn’t come from Dundee on account of her bronchitis. And Mama was afraid of the earthquake. Christie had to be helped back to her feet when she sat in her rocking chair. She was afraid of falling. She had to struggle up the steps to the porch. On New Year’s Day, she managed to cook field peas and turnip-greens-with-hog-jaws for good luck, but the cornbread burned. She hated being fat. She remembered an old woman in Dundee who told Christie’s mother, “I had a fat place to come on my leg, just like a tit.” The woman said, “The doctor mashed it up real good and then drawed that fat out through a little hole.”
Christie fell asleep early at night, curving away from James. She couldn’t sleep comfortably in any position except on her side, with a knee pulled up to support her belly. She curled her body around the baby, holding it as closely as possible—hooked to it from heartbeat to heartbeat, her blood flowing into her child.
X
Literary Meanderings
NABOKOV
For me, literary criticism is a foreign language, and I haven’t made a habit of it. Writing fiction is more inviting than writing nonfiction, which demands a logical mind and a fidelity to fact. I usually approach essays and reporting much as I do fiction—as organic, intricately involved designs rather than as straightforward journalism—and I usually find that the design doesn’t want to be that literal.
I wrote my graduate dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. The novel was new at the time, and only reviewers had picked at its dense fabric. John Updike in his review said it would be good fodder for some graduate student, and I grabbed the challenge. It was a great pleasure trying to track down the hundreds or thousands of literary allusions, obscure words, and intricate patterns in this seemingly abstruse novel. My youthful earnestness ran roughshod over the delicacy and exquisiteness of Nabokov’s novel, and I apologize for the excesses of the misdirected scholar that I was then.
Luckily, my scholarly pursuits more or less ended there, but I still urge the reader to delve into the magic of Nabokov’s writing, including the dazzle and dance of his poetic novel Ada.
MARK TWAIN
I wrote about Mark Twain’s humor and language for an introductory essay to one of his novels, The American Claimant, in the Oxford series of facsimiles of Twain’s books.
Mark Twain’s parents migrated from Kentucky to Missouri. Twain’s dialogue could have been a transcription of my grandparents talking. It was the language I used for the novel Feather Crowns, as it channeled through my parents and grandparents.
—BAM
The Universe of Ada
FROM Nabokov’s Garden (1974)
John Updike, in his New Yorker review of Ada, chides Nabokov—whom he otherwise admires greatly—for taking his characters off the planet Earth and fabricating a science-fiction wonderland for otherwise earthly beings. He says: “I confess to a prejudice: fiction is earthbound, and while in decency the names of small towns and middling cities must be faked, metropolises and nations are unique and should be given their own names or none. I did not even like it when Nabokov, in Pale Fire, gave New York State the preempted appellation of Appalachia.” By suggesting that Updike has made a mistake about Nabokov’s setting, I hope to settle some business the discussion to follow has no time otherwise to pursue, but which would be useful to bear in mind. The action of Ada ostensibly occurs on the planet Antiterra, a mirror-image of our possibly microscopic Terra; and there is a time lag between the two planets, as well as a relentless distortion of Earth geography on Antiterra. The late 1800s on Antiterra have a modern earthtime superimposed on them, with Coca-Cola and motorcars and planes and movies; and Russia and America are blurred together. The reversal of time and the distortion of geography a
re often tedious and teasing for the reader used to expecting a replica of his own planet in the fiction he reads.
However, Updike surely would not object to a first-person novel about a character who does not tell his story straight: we have many of these. And, I submit, this is exactly the case in Ada. Van Veen, the narrator of the novel—who is obsessed with his sister Ada and wants to recreate in his chronicle the Ardis, or paradise, of his youth with her—is given to exaggeration, as well as self-delusion, romanticizing, and (both conscious and unconscious) distortion and manipulation of memory. He is so unable to face the real world head-on that he goes so far as to fantasize that his story did not take place on the planet Earth, where human beings live and die, but on Antiterra, subtitled Demonia, a hell which he argues he must escape through the private, self-reflecting act of incest: a delicious and erotic flight from the deadly claims of the world around him. Van, I suggest, invents Antiterra to justify his own departure from reality: for him Demonia is the planet ruled by his father Demon and others of his ilk (tabooists with conflicting sets of standards). If the world is such a place, then, Van congratulates himself on trying to construct a more nearly perfect world: his private Ardis, or Eden. And this act of escape from Antiterra is, in effect, Van would argue, an escape to Terra—to the earth, to nature, and to a normalized geography. But this is all Van’s rationalizing: he has a monstrous ego, as Updike is correct in emphasizing; and Van’s incest with Ada, as I will argue, is unnatural and wrong, within the terms of the book. Hence, Van’s fantasy: his effort to distort things in such a way that he is justified in his incest.
Van points out that he is not alone on Antiterra, that everyone is trying to get away from it, and that some go mad in the attempt, for Terra the Fair is a hoped-for heaven, knowledge of which is obtained through the visions of madmen. Some people on Antiterra—including Van, himself a madman of sorts—take these visions to be true evidence of the existence of Terra.
When Van writes about his adolescence, Ardis—the garden/paradise of his youth—appears as a fanciful jumble of aristocratic old Russia and modern America, with servants on an old country estate as well as flying carpets (a misplaced fantasy Arabia) and central heating. Van’s motivation here is the creation of a perfectly delightful world for himself to dwell in in memory—one which combines the best of two worlds (such as the two spheres which Nabokov himself has inhabited and unites in his own experience—but, as I will argue, Van and Nabokov should not be confused with one another in reading the novel). However, as Van grows older and goes away from Ardis, more conventional, earthlike realities intrude upon his consciousness—bothersome mockeries of his youthful dream: the rise of modern hotels, wars, “sham art,” the advent of electricity and self-service elevators.
Van Veen, as I shall attempt to show, tries to blame the disastrous consequences of his affair with his sister upon his heritage, upon his corrupt and luxurious family, and upon a demonic planet with narrow-minded conventions. But Van, in spite of his attempt to portray the naturalness and delightfulness of incest, is tormented by guilt and fear that his behavior was unnatural.
The use of the sibling planets Terra and Antiterra is a reflection—among many others in the book—of the incest theme. Ada is about incest, and, as incest is treated in the book, it is virtually synonymous with solipsism. Van and Ada Veen, siblings, resemble each other like twins and love each other passionately, but their love essentially is like masturbation before a mirror. Van narrates the story in an attempt to capture forever the essence of that childhood “paradise” with Ada in the bushes and to rationalize away his guilt.
In effect, Van Veen attempts to opt out of life, with its changes and surprises and calamities, by arresting it and trying to patrol his one narrow nook—his book, which contains his memories, as he has reworked and romanticized them into his immortalized Ardis, a bright and beautiful world besieged by the dark forces of Antiterra. He fails, as his narrative reveals, because realities continually intrude, and Van never is able to face them straightforwardly—nature, Ada’s needs, mortality, even the geography of the planet, which he twists mercilessly in the process of his self-justification.
In his review, Updike kindly invites the graduate student to “spend many a pleasant and blameless hour unstitching the sequined embroidery of Nabokov’s five years’ labor of love.” Thank you for the invitation, Mr. Updike: here is the first tangle of thread, but, of course, there is “much, much more.”
FROM Mark Twain’s
The American Claimant
Introduction to the 2004 Edition
In most of the places I’ve lived, Mark Twain has left his mark. When I lived near Elmira, New York, I went to movies at the Twain Theater and shopped at Langdon Plaza, built on the site of Twain’s Elmira-born wife’s family home. The octagonal study in which he wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn sits on the campus of Elmira College like a misplaced steamboat’s pilothouse. I peeked through the windows once, expecting to see cats. I’ve supped at the Mark Twain Hotel in Elmira.
When I lived in Connecticut, I frequently drove past Twain’s gaudy mansion but never took the tour. As a Southerner undergoing the culture shock of moving north to graduate school, I was too disoriented to imagine I had anything in common with Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ own long-ago journey from the heartland to Hartford.
We have a claim on Mark Twain in Kentucky, where I’m from. His parents grew up there and got married in Lexington. His mother was born in Adair County; her cousin, Major James J. Lampton, the original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers in The American Claimant, lived in Hopkinsville. Colonel Henry Watterson, editor of the Courier-Journal in Louisville, was also some sort of distant cousin of Twain’s. And then there’s Cousin Jesse Madison Leathers, from Mercer County—more on him later.
Twain’s native Missouri is our neighbor. The Mark Twain National Forest is just across the Mississippi River from western Kentucky, where I grew up. And Dawson’s Landing of Pudd’nhead Wilson is somewhere out there. Cairo, which figures so big in Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, is nearby. I married a man born in Missouri. My father-in-law is even from Hannibal.
I’m sure I’m not the only admirer of Mark Twain who feels his presence all over the place. Mark Twain got around. He is part of the American landscape, always underfoot. He’s very contemporary, I think, because in his time he saw so far ahead, as if he were looking right at us. And so we’re reminded of him everywhere. His white-haired image was ingrained in us in childhood when we played the card game Authors. Today he’s known to the public at large through impersonators. There are few figures in American history who lend themselves so frequently to impersonation: Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and Elvis Presley. Twain was America’s first superstar. And he knew it, too. He created his own persona—the unsmiling man in dazzling white, a clever icon designed to last. And for all I know, he had it copyrighted.
My own feeling for Mark Twain is grand and large. He’s dear to my heart for a number of reasons, not least of which was his love for cats. Maybe my infatuation has something to do with the photograph I saw of him years ago—the one without a shirt. All that hair on his head and chest is resplendent. The photograph is shocking because he seems so real, so physical, not some stuffy, overly clothed portrait from another century. We don’t expect Victorians to be sexy.
For me, the feeling for Twain is close to home. I claim Samuel Clemens–Mark Twain for my own personal heritage, as regional kin. I’m a descendant of the Clemenses’ neighbors, more or less. Those pioneer families who crossed the Cumberland Gap and settled along the Cumberland River through Kentucky and Tennessee, and across the Mississippi River into Missouri, had much in common. Twain heard the same stories my forefathers did, talked the talk that was and still is pervasive in that stretch of country. My great-great-grandfather, John P. Mason, might have swapped some tales with John Marshall Clemens, Twain’s father. They were about the same age and in the same vicinity at the same time. (Such wheedlings
out of the murk of history are the sideline stuff of the genealogy craze.)
Mark Twain’s original boyhood language, the deepest source of his artistic energy, is familiar to me. The varieties of dialect in Huckleberry Finn are quite particular. In general, though, the language—not just the idiom but the intonations and rhythms and cadences—is the way my grandparents and parents talked, and it’s a language that is still spoken throughout the mid-South from the Appalachians through the Ozarks. I’m partial to a culture that uses the phrase “telling a story” to mean “lying.” (When she caught me in a lie, my mother would say, suspiciously, “Are you telling me a story?”) And I’m thrilled to read any writer who has the audacity to put the word “pudd’nhead” in a title and who uses the word “sqush” a lot. The “whang” in Huckleberry Finn’s voice is as familiar to me as the speech of my parents. They would say “chimbley” and “dust-rag” and “fair-to-middling” and use fishing-worms for bait and bark their shins, and they would say “curious” to mean “peculiar.” They have even called me “pudd’nhead”—with affection, of course, the same way they’d say somebody “needs killing.” They didn’t really mean it the way it sounded.
This language has a certain higgledy-piggledy quality, which accounts for Huckleberry Finn’s outlandish way of talking—Twain’s exaggeration of the actual speech of a young boy. It’s a language that functions through its potential for inventiveness just as the necessities of the frontier called for ingenious solutions—making do with what was at hand. I call it riggedup language. You can rig up phrases and invent words when you don’t have more precise words at hand, the way you might rig up a makeshift lock for a door, or knock together a stile to get over a fence. That’s how Twain came up with “spider-webby,” “waffle-iron face,” “premature balditude,” “googling out,” “ring-streaked-and-striped,” etc. He took advantage of this creative potential in the language he learned as a youth. This way of talking often uses more words—and especially a lot of prepositions and adverbs and intensifiers strung together, each deeply meaningful and particular—but that’s the fun of words. Instead of “forsythia,” my grandmother might say “them yaller bushes up yonder around to the back of the barn.” Or she might say, “Go get me that jar—the one that did for your last-summer lightning-bug catcher—down from up off of that board that’s tacked up all antigodlin out yonder in the smokehouse. It’s way back in the back.” Having to piece scraps of words together keeps the brain active and the ear lively.
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