Love of a Bossy List

What You Should Be Reading III

So this is a series about my reading through a particular Greatest Books list which I started doing about five years ago. I also read other things and often have to push myself to return to the list — where I am always rewarded.

I’m not really claiming that anyone else should be reading what I’m reading, it’s the voice of the list that says What You Should Be Reading. I’m an author and sometimes professor of history and of literature and creative writing so

a) I’d already read a good chunk of the list when I found it; and

b) it’s a little bit my job to read these books and may or may not be yours.

I chose this list because it was clickable and because it was a composite of many other lists. It wasn’t a project at first, I just observed that the books that I’ve read on this list are favorites, they’re books I’ve loved so much I’ve reread them. Damn, if the list is that good, I thought, I should try the rest of it.

Today’s report begins with a book not on the list, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. Stegner is on the list, but not in the first hundred. His best number is The Angel of Repose (886), which won the Pulitzer, and two others make the list in the thousands. Did I mention that the list is immense?

I bring up Crossing to Safety because I just happened to read it and Stegner was an erudite sumabich and so books on the hundred best list pop up in his texts as deft allusions and devices.

He’s describing a party that erupted spontaneously at his apartment because he’s just received news that his book is to be published and word has spread through his tight writing community. One might not have planned a party with a wife so pregnant. This is his first book yes, but it’s her first baby and it is an any day now situation. She is set up regally on the couch and when he checks on her she is always fine.

He’s about to tell us that he was an idiot for not paying closer attention and in fact sending everyone home. He’s implied it already and is now telling the story.

“I notice her only intermittently, for the party is a real fog-of-battle scene, as confused as Tolstoy’s Sebastopol or Stendhal’s Waterloo.” (p. 110)

So. Perhaps you recall that in my first What You Should Be Reading I talked about having just finally read War and Peace (16), driven by the list. And I wrote about the very thing he is referring to here, which is the same thing I vaguely knew about the book before I read it. It’s not just the “fog of war” making things confused. The confusion is so profound that only afterwards do people read sense into it. In the event it is chaos, fear, and hiding — with “courage” more often a matter of self-aggrandizement or simple freaking out, while real courage goes unwitnessed and turns out to not have mattered anyway. Everyone is hopelessly lost in their own limited picture of what is going on.

Could I have understood Stegner’s sentence without having read War and Peace? For sure, but it comes with flashbacks of battle now. Have I read Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (242) where he talks Waterloo? I have not. Several years ago this list encouraged me to read his The Red and the Black (52) and I left part of myself in the main character’s upper window, at midnight, watching the garden for his girl to show up while he plots his next move.

What am I missing with only half Stegner’s reference? Obviously, I can’t know.

Another allusion in Crossing to Safety is haunting me, and I’d like to try to describe its circuitous sneak attack. Without ever saying the name “Yeats,” Stegner has a character quote the first four lines of the William Butler Yeats poem, “The Lake Island of Innisfree” (p.85)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made

Nine beanrows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee

And live alone in the bee-loud glade

In Stegner’s memoir, the rich man’s wife, Charity, wants him, Sid, to do good in the world, and does not want to let him hide away and write poetry, which is what he wants to do. She says that a brilliant man with his resources could do anything and this one just needs to be pushed out of his natural torpor. What does he want? He wants his natural torpor. He does see her point and is open to being seduced by the flattery but it isn’t exactly in his nature. He expresses that to her in quoting the poem. He wants a life close to nature, private, with poetry.

There’s a real island that Yeats is thinking of, near where his family spent summers. The great swathes of heather turn the very air purple and at night the stars twinkle above and shimmer in the lake, below.

But there’s more! The poem’s beginning “I will arise and go now” is itself an allusion, to the parable of the Prodigal Son, in the Gospel of Luke, in the Christian Bible.

One son leaves home, spends up his inheritance, and finds himself broke and miserable in a foreign land, and he decides, “I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him father I have sinned against thee and heaven…” can I be your servant? and his dad says Yay you’re home and they clean him up and roast the fatted calf. So “I will arise and go to…” means that one has accepted defeat and its humiliation and would like to go home now, under any conditions.

I love the desperation here. As much as this poem wants to return to nature, this is also an I GIVE UP poem.

I say that because, the lake island isn’t home, no signs of home are given. Lake islands are small and uninhabited, within the realm of civilization but not part of it. The poem isn’t proposing something most people would actually want to do. Today it registers more as an extreme reality show than as a happy place. So the poem is more conceptual? Is it just saying “Fuck off” to his life? It seems to me announcing I want to be alone is similar to saying I’ve been hurt.

In Stegner’s book, the talk keeps using the poem’s symbology— any work that doesn’t benefit others is “nine beanrows”—for several pages. But Stegner never explains the poem in the least—again, he never even mentions Yeats. He certainly never explains the Prodigal Son parable. The Yeats poem was written in 1888 and published soon after and it made Yeats’s name. It was wildly popular. In fact, long after he had written some of the greatest, most exciting poems of the English language, he was still best known for this quiet one. Stegner BTW was writing in the 1970s reporting on events of the 1930s.

Crossing to Safety is a memoir of a friendship and a portrait of the friends. One day he and his wife meet the fabulous Langs, Charity and Sid, and the couple friendship spans their lives. The occasion for writing the book is that Charity Lang is ill and dying. And the book is ever so slightly more a portrait of her than of anyone else. She is the most amazing person in the book, gorgeous and fun, able to create a community wherever she goes, but she is also bossy and painfully unwilling to change her mind.

Life among people means jockeying for position and—despite all of Charity’s positive thinking—sometimes losing, and Sid Lang got chewed up by it as we all do, one way or another, and it hurts. It burns like a broken bone. As Stegner must have felt, as Yeats must have felt, and as the Prodigal Son must have felt.

Sooo, what have we lost in the loss of literature as a code language of the most inner heart? We are always stranded inside our own heads, solitary. We ache to share our feelings and yet, once spoken, some mysterious aspects of life can seem banal. That goes for confessions of depression, for sure. It helps to have images to point to, when it’s hard to put subtle feelings into words.

It’s nice to say to the world, I’m going to Innisfree, and to know how many of us mutter it along with you while basically agreeing to the lives we have already made. Here are the other two stanzas of the poem.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The poem repeats its important allusion at the start of the final stanza and then tells us he more than wants this, he’s obsessed, a bit tortured. “Day and night” he hears the lapping water. All he tells us about what he wants to escape is roads, paved, and grey. But since what he wants is peace, and he knows peace comes dropping slow, we know that his real life is a bit of a war, or at least busy as those first-stanza bees.

The last line makes us think about the heart of the heart, it speaks to what we can’t say, that there is a hidden inner self and it knows things, it hears things.

Charity is dying and still fiercely in charge and her wishes create a final fracas, a real fog-of-battle scene. Tending nine bean rows alone suddenly seems like a fake little death in the face of real death. And aren’t we all the prodigal child, humbled and broke, our vaunted venture failed? And many of us find at least a good meal at the end of it and even love.

So go get you some summer laze my loves, my laborers, and my linchpins, and let peace comes dropping slow.

Okay, that’s it for this sunny Wednesday. Be safe, stay alive, and I shall return to encourage you again.

love,

Jennifer