Of remembered events, several are crucial and presage the tragedy that will overtake the family: the violent incident in the first April when on the father’s birthday Kerrin kills the family’s dog; the appearance of a hardly human beggar from town seeking food from farmers; the expulsion of the mother and daughters from church. There are also the meanings of these events that Marget cannot fathom, and her questioning is a counterpoint to the daily life “without any more mystery than the noon sun” (p. 33). Over and over she asks herself about the burden of debt the family bears, the family’s unending toil, its cruel interpersonal blindness, and its frail love. “There must be some reason, I thought, why we should go on year after year, with this lump of debt, scrailing earth down to stone, giving so much and with no return. There must be some reason why I was made quiet and homely and slow, and then given this stone of love to mumble” (pp. 127–28).
These memories are interwoven in a skillful and sophisticated way with the present world of the novel. As in her much later work, The Inland Island, Johnson uses the cycle of seasons and the period of each month to structure her work, and it is the circular repetition of months within linear time that permits her to move from a past November, for example, to a present one so easily. Marget remembers “now” (in November of the tenth year of the family’s life on the farm) the eight months from March on in which the tensions within the family peak and explode. These months coincide with a period of intense anxiety about the fields, livestock, garden, and house in a year of drought, and with a labor struggle in surrounding farms and towns.
In April, the month of fragile new life, the hired man Max departs, and Grant Koven arrives, a man who is kind, has been to school, and whom Marget and Kerrin both love. The unnatural dryness of May is coupled with Marget’s recognition that her love will be unfulfilled: Grant is taken with Merle. In July the corn is dead and other crops have shriveled, and Kerrin grows increasingly strange and frightening, increasingly in pursuit of Grant. On the last day of July, Ramsey, the black tenant farmer and the father of six children, is thrown off the land; and Rathman, the only farmer whose land is paid off, breaks his hip, thus destroying even the hopefulness of a comfortable survival nearby. August brings Kerrin’s strangeness into the open; she is dismissed from her teaching position. As heat and sun dry the land, fires break out, paralleling the emotional turmoil among the Haldemarnes and inflicting grave losses on both family and farm. September is the month of separation, anticipated loss, and death. In October come the recuperative rains, and sustenance in the beauty of the “dry grey-orange branches blown back and forth like bushes in the wind” (p. 230).
It is also a seasonal repetition that forms the basis for Johnson’s perspective on time’s passing and the impossibility of change. Seasonal patterns continue on into infinity, their course unalterable; change beyond that already patterned, she dismisses as a naive hope. But Johnson distinguishes carefully between change and growth. As usual, her metaphor is from nature: “the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth” (p. 70). This sentiment is also expressed as an aphorism: “time does nothing but enlarge without mutation” (p. 69). This perspective serves as a useful guide to our reading of Johnson’s characters. Early on Johnson establishes each character’s way of being in the world—Mother who has faith in the human spirit; Merle who is honest, lucid, sane; Kerrin fierce with love and hatred; the father worn with physical labor and care; the narrator energized by longing, doubt, and earthly beauty. These qualities never change, but surface events, circumstances, and the chronological and linear time of the plot serve to amplify and deepen our knowledge of each character, help us to know more deeply what we knew in the very beginning. Looking back, the narrator works with the fragmented memories not to interpret them, but to gather them up like the pieces of a puzzle, the whole of which had been already formed, though not yet seen by the human eye. Indeed, the last sentence of the novel circles up to the time of the first sentence, the structure of the novel forming the pieces into a totality that begins and ends “Now in November” when “I can see our years as a whole.”
“this feeling of waiting, of life suspended
and held in a narrow circle”
One helpful way to situate Now in November is to categorize it as a novel of female late adolescence—of waiting, thinking, observing, anticipating, but not of action. Indeed, despite the harsh, rural setting and backdrop of political violence and economic deprivation, the sisters of Now in November are not unlike Jane Austen’s sister of Pride and Prejudice or George Eliot’s Dorothea in Middlemarch or Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest in the novel of the same name. Unspoken rules and social mores shape these young female lives: these young women long for freedom to leave home, but they are forbidden to venture into the world alone; they long for sexual experience, for intimacy, but they can do nothing but be attractive, useful, and available; they are on the verge of intellectual maturity, but have only books and abstractions, not the dilemmas of the public world with which to grapple. Furthermore, they know that decisions about religion and personal philosophy belong to the men of the family, and no matter what independent ideas they develop, these will be tempered in marriage.
Looking back over her family history and early married life in the memoir Seven Houses, Johnson speaks about herself in the period between girlhood and marriage (she married at age thirty-two) in just these terms: “I seemed to be waiting to begin to live and not all the beauty, all the intensity of the words on paper, all the desperate search for reform and change, the bitterness of the Depression years, not the love for my sisters nor the tortuous refining of personal philosophy, seemed to be the reality of living that I wanted to find. And then I met Grant Cannon and the waiting-to-live was over and the real life began” (p. 87). (It is, of course, a coincidence that the single attractive, compassionate, engaged man in the novel is named Grant: Johnson did not meet her husband until some seven years after the novel was published.) The three sisters Johnson creates are similarly suspended between girlhood and womanhood; each is waiting to assume her role as marriage partner with a man, as keeper of the domestic sphere, and as mother of children. The event that can precipitate this next phase of life, can move a late adolescent into womanhood, is a heterosexual love relation that will focus latent sexual feeling and make manifest the structure of the life to follow.
In the novel this theme of waiting, of “not acting,” with its accompanying theme of the mystery of men, is treated with delicacy and sensitivity. Each sister experiences the waiting of adolescence differently. Kerrin, the eldest, is restless, “sick and drawn inside with hate” (p. 16). “I knew,” says Marget’s narrative voice, “that she wanted love,—not anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father’s . . . , but some man’s love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true” (p. 46). Kerrin is enraged by her father’s unwillingness to let her plough because he believes that “a girl could never learn how” (p. 15).5 Kerrin taunts and challenges her father who responds to her from a remote emotional distance, “as though to a little dog that insisted on yapping, a little dog that he might kick soon” (p. 64). She is furious with her mother for her quiet yielding to her husband’s views. It is interesting to note that in her perception that one cause of tension between young girls, their mothers, and female teachers is the anger of the young about the powerlessness and acquiescence of the older, Johnson anticipates recent work in the psychology of women and girls, particularly that of Carol Gilligan and her collaborators.6
Identified with the active world of men yet forbidden entry, Kerrin also hates the girls she teaches in her one-room school. “[They] were already vacant wives, she said,—not stolid, their tongues slapping around like wheels, but already bounded tight with convention, a thick wall between them and the unknown things” (p. 42). In her discontent, she separates herself from the family, stirs trouble everywhere, sl
eeps in the barn, eats ravenously after the family meals are finished. With Grant, she is as aggressive as a young woman can be without overtly transgressing the rules of gender roles. She devises strategies to call attention to herself and, in her sisters’ view, shows an excitement on the verge of madness. In Kerrin, Johnson portrays a young woman angry at the circumstances of her female life, unable to build a reliable self, and snatching at the figure of a man hoping in him to find her own salvation. “She made me think of the carrion vines that move with a hungry aimlessness,” Marget says, “groping blindly in all directions till they find a stalk to wrap on” (p. 107).
Merle, the youngest sister, is in many ways Kerrin’s opposite in late adolescence. At peace with herself, “she did not fight half-heartedly with faceless shadows, masked forms she was afraid to name, but knew things for what they were and twisted them apart” (p. 71). She is able to forget what has hurt her, and not sour her happiness. Marget characterizes Merle as having the courage to live by her beliefs, and distinguishes Merle from herself, repeating a theme of the novel, and of Johnson’s short stories and poetry. Merle, Marget says, “seemed to deny in her living what I had always found true—that love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love then the greater fear is” (p. 71). It is not surprising, then, that it is Merle the father loves most, Merle whom he declares “would have made a good boy” (p. 63), and Merle to whom Grant is attracted. It is Merle who has the luxury of saying blandly, “Men are all like each other . . . They’re like as ponds. Seem to think that just being born sets them apart as gods!” (pp. 86–87). And then when Grant volunteers to help her with women’s work—the wringing out of newly washed shirts—it is she who can modify her view: “Maybe just being a man isn’t all the excuse you need for living” (p. 88).
But it is in Marget herself that the theme of late adolescent waiting is most beautifully and deeply realized. It is through Marget that Johnson works out the personal philosophy that will emerge matured, but essentially unchanged, in her work in late middle age. Marget is wise enough in her waiting to see the grand difference between men and women, but to see individual men as well. She can differentiate between her embittered, distant father and Grant who is hard too, but in a different way. And it is Marget who struggles and finds an enduring way to understand and sustain herself: her connection to the world of nature. Marget asks the grand scale, philosophical questions we associate with the college years: in church, she wonders, “why the people were here and if God was here” (p. 136) and she asks, “if in what I knew and had heard of their lives there was any plan or patterns that could answer their being here” (p. 137). In bed at night, she worries about the taxes on the farm, about a new shed and the recipe for a cake; these she places in the category “daily living” and to them she opposes “the meaning of all these evident things that still stayed hidden” (p. 127). Like many late adolescents, she yearns for a faith and yieldingness like her mother’s, but feels “often on the threshold of some important and clarifying light, some answer to more than the obvious things,” but always, on the verge of discovery, truth is “shut away” (p. 127). As the drought closes in around the farm and Grant turns more obviously to Merle, and Kerrin grows more grasping, more nearly mad, Marget characterizes herself fully as a late adolescent: “I wished I were ten years younger, or ten older! If I were younger, [the burdens] would not exist; and older—I could learn to accept them” (p. 108).
“We were added to by the shadow of leaves. . . .
We were the green peas, hard and swollen.”
For Marget (and for Johnson too), the sustenance, if not an answer to the grand questions, is found in nature. It is the use of nature and the language of nature that allows us to place Now in November in a second literary category: the pastoral. Like My Antonia, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Furs, and more recent works such as John Berger’s trilogy in progress, Into Their Labors; like the poetry of Amy Clampitt and A. R. Ammons, in some ways like Emily Dickinson and Thoreau, the Nature of Johnson’s work is much more than a backdrop for action or an ornament to the passing show of human foible. Nature is more than land to be worked and food to be produced. Nor is nature only loveliness; it is that and more. Unlike Annie Dillard, Johnson is no humble pilgrim worshiping at Tinker’s Creek. In The Inland Island, she declares, “I am a bird watcher—a deeply interested observer, not a bird-lover. Their beaks are too sharp and their round eyes cold” (p. 11).
Now in November begins a strand of Johnson’s work, culminating in The Inland Island some thirty years later, which takes nature two ways simultaneously: realistically and metaphorically (as a language for mirroring and explaining human nature).7 It is the combination of these two, along with the country/city contrast discussed below, that makes this a pastoral. Like the naturalist, Johnson describes literally and in minute detail grasses, flowers, the leaves of trees, the scales of snakes’ skin; but, additionally, for Johnson, human activity has meaning through nature. Human nature is nature; and the natural world reflects back to human sensibility the only acceptable, meaning-making pattern of experience to be discovered.
Johnson works with nature in several distinct but intertwining ways. Descriptive passages ground the novel. A reader can map the land, draw the rutted road, situate the orchards and field, paint the apple blossoms of spring and the shriveled leaves of August drought from the novel’s careful description. Then, in seemingly effortless and exquisite simile and metaphor, Johnson uses nature’s language to describe human beings—their identity, growth, emotions, their outward appearance. (I think it is her talent for the stunning metaphor [“We were the green peas, hard and swollen” (p. 59)] that led critics to compare her with Dickinson, but Dickinson is not particularly helpful in understanding Johnson’s prose. Dickinson has a far more oblique relation to nature, a pessimism and fragility absent from Johnson’s work.) And, finally there is Johnson’s ability to draw sustenance from nature, to take it as a force of healing. It is worth pausing to look closely at Johnson’s prose in several illustrative instances.
Even in the most “routine,” utilitarian description of the Haldemarne farm on the first page of the novel, the human, seeing eye/I endows her observation with a special perspective derived from the meaning of things in the month of March. Without declaring herself in a heavy-handed way, the narrator selects a month on the cusp of change—no longer winter and not yet spring when hope is at its peak. In the passage below, this moment of anticipation is captured in the contrast between the bare hills from which the remnants of winter have been swept away, the ledges with their “white teeth” and the orchard, which to the trained, observing eye is full of promise.
The hills were bare then and swept of winter leaves, but the orchards had a living look. They were stained with the red ink of their sap and the bark tight around them as though too small to hold the new life of coming leaves. . . . The land was stony, but with promise, and sheep grew fat in the pastures where rock ledges were worn black, white like stone teeth bared to frost. (Pp. 3–4, italics added)
In these first paragraphs, too, Johnson establishes her easy intimacy with nature as a language for human nature, using freshly and extending later in the novel the metaphor of humans as having “roots.” Of the Haldemarne family, the narrator declares, “The roots of our life, struck in back there that March, have a queer resemblance to their branches” (p. 3). Later, Johnson uses the metaphor again to describe Kerrin: “She carried the root of her unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted” (pp. 45–46). And again of herself and Merle: “From the beginning we had felt rooted and born here, like the twin scrub-oak trees that grew together in the north pasture and turned lacquer-red in fall, and whose roots were under the white ledgestones” (p. 58). And again as an
abstraction revealing the pattern into which Johnson has put human life—the combination of cyclic and linear movement: “Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth” (pp. 69–70).
But it is the sustaining and healing of nature that in the end brings together the adolescent’s philosophical questions and the harsh facts of her daily life; and it is this nature that stands in contrast to the differently problematic world beyond the farm—a conventional pastoral theme I discuss below. Increasingly troubled in her silent love for Grant, in her sister’s madness, in the farm’s withering crops, Marget is still rendered speechless, feels as if her heart will break because of the earth’s unbearable, clean beauty (p. 114 ff.). At night she wanders out seeking some way of putting herself “beyond pain” (p. 217) and finds a kind of peace in the “whiteness” of the moon’s light and the night wind” (p. 218). What she sees in nature is not perfection, but “beauty in all its twisted forms, not pure, unadulterated, but mixed always with sour potato-peelings or an August sun” (p. 226). It is this then that gives nature its sustaining force—that it mirrors what, according to human judgment and philosophy, might be good and evil, but renders all in order of things. Even the tragedy that envelopes the family can have its edge blunted when placed in the neutral context of seasonal growth, death, and renewal. In an early prefiguring of the book’s tragic end, Kerrin finds a shrike in the crab branches that she characterizes as “a cruel thing, impaling the field-mice and birds on locust thorns so that their feet stuck out stiff like little hands” (pp. 10–11). Already able to reject this view as sentimental, Marget says presciently, “I didn’t think they were cruel things though—only natural. They reminded me of Kerrin, but this I had sense not to say aloud” (p. 11). The assignment of the label “natural” to human happiness, daily toil, and tragedy—even the tragedy of Kerrin’s madness and its aftermath—is the foundation of Johnson’s philosophy.
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