A Guest at the Feast, page 20
Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980, has an undertone of a story from the Old Testament mixed with a novel by William Faulkner. It’s a narrative of misfortune and pestilence, an account of survival in a rugged landscape against all the odds, told in a tone that is fearless, poetic, elaborate in its cadences but also, at times, sharp and precise, and at other times comic. It begins with no nonsense and plenty of command: ‘My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs Sylvia Fisher.’ It’s clear from ‘and when they fled’, from the number of carers and the formal, distant way they are named that this won’t be a story of domestic harmony and bliss.
The next image adds to the sense of dislocation: we are told that before the narrator’s grandfather Edmund Foster ‘put us down in this unlikely place’, he grew up ‘in the Middle West, in a house dug out of the ground, with windows just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without, the house was a mere mound, no more a human stronghold than a grave’. ‘This unlikely place’ is called Fingerbone. Ruth says that it ‘was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsize landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.’ The extravagant weather brings a flood, which ‘flattened scores of headstones’ and makes the house where Ruth and her sister, Lucille, live almost uninhabitable. The town isn’t helped by the flood either: ‘Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but perhaps because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming.’ The loss, of course, comes as a gain to the narrative, which has tremendous fun describing flood damage: ‘The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.’ Some of the sentences seem overblown: ‘Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.’ But the world being described is rooted enough to survive Robinson’s high rhetorical flight, and we breathe a sigh of relief when she ends the paragraph that contains the sentence I just quoted with: ‘But then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water slid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud.’
America here is desolation, an unpromising Promised Land waiting for redemption. The language of the novel moves from terse description to sentences that have distinct references to scripture, not just the general tone of the Bible but images and stories from the Old Testament and the New. When two apple trees die, Robinson invokes Lazarus, as well as the parting of the waters: ‘One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly . . . miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two.’
Later, when Ruth is on a boat with her aunt, she witnesses the dawn. Writers should always be careful with the dawn – it’s tempting to be overblown – but Robinson manages two reasonable sentences: ‘To the east the mountains were eclipsed. To the west they stood in balmy light.’ And then she moves into what we know from her essays as her area of interest: ‘Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven . . .’ She is too intelligent to expect her readers to connect the dawn and heaven, so she ends the sentence with a twist: ‘a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable’.
But she is ready, too, to take risks. There is an extraordinary passage, for example, that describes the grandmother’s death: ‘It was as if, drowning in air, she had leaped toward ether.’ Ruth then imagines her grandmother as she ‘burst through the spume’ of life, as though she had been rescued from a disaster. ‘And my grandmother would scan the shores to see how nearly the state of grace resembled the state of Idaho, and to search the growing crowds for familiar faces.’
Later, there is a description of the lake using further images from the Old Testament:
One can imagine that, at the apex of the Flood, when the globe was a ball of water, came the day of divine relenting, when Noah’s wife must have opened the shutters upon a morning designed to reflect an enormous good nature . . . Looking out at the lake one could believe that the Flood had never ended. If one is lost on the water, any hill is Ararat.
In the first few pages of Chapter 10 Robinson turns up further the great hot tap of her biblical prose to muse on God’s response to events of the Old Testament. Cain and Abel get a look-in, as do Rachel, King David, Absalom and Eve. This is, in all its fervid rhythm, as good as it gets. The second paragraph begins:
Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground – a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that he found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things.
Robinson’s application of high images from religion and high tones from the Bible to the low world – forlorn, inhospitable and backward America – is startling and fascinating. The power of Housekeeping comes from the confidence with which she merges this heightened, numinous world with the ordinary, the detailed, the credible. The problem with casting such a glowing spell on our poor, sad universe, however, is that, as with a novel that changes the bread and wine into the body and blood, it shouldn’t be attempted twice. The danger for Robinson, having managed such a successful piece of high-voltage fiction, is the same as the danger for Hemingway once he had created a low-voltage style, or indeed for James in his opaque late style: the danger of self-parody and the seeping presence of the reader’s irony, the reader’s restlessness. While Robinson gets away by the skin of her teeth with comparing the state of Idaho with the state of grace, she wouldn’t were she to find another state of the union and try the comparison a second time. (‘Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,’ Flannery O’Connor has one of her characters say.)
Robinson didn’t publish her second novel, Gilead, until twenty-four years after Housekeeping. She wrote it, she told The Paris Review, in eighteen months. It would be impossible for a future biographer, even if there are diaries and letters, to chart what happened to her sensibility over the years between the two books. Certainly, there is evidence of a tonal softening, a freeing up of the processes of imagining, a peeling away of protection that causes her now to insist less on a high-voltage style and concentrate instead on character. Gilead and the novels that have come since – Home (2008), Lila (2014) and Jack (2020) – depend more on sympathy and ambiguity. Robinson has learned to cast a gentler gaze on the world, but the gaze is still filled with depth and wonder. The Christian God, apparent in Housekeeping, also lives in the body of these three novels, but Robinson has come up with the inspired idea of allowing the souls of the novels, so to speak, to be fully human.
One of the best novels about religion in America is Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927. Some of the power of the book arises from the dramatizing of the relationship over forty years between two Catholic priests as they attempt to make a Catholic diocese out of New Mexico. It is easy to see how much duller the book could be were one of the priests left out. Its plot would be predictable, no matter how much conscience the priest could muster, or how many prayers he said, or ghastly setbacks he suffered. In Cather’s novel, the drama arises from the difference between Fr Latour and Fr Vaillant, as a sort of Catholic Don Quixote and his optimistic, energetic sidekick. Fr Vaillant, ‘wherever he went . . . soon made friends that took the place of country and family’. But Fr Latour, ‘who was at ease in any society and always the flower of courtesy, could not form new ties. It had always been so. He was like that even as a boy: gracious to everyone but known to a very few.’ These differences, then, make their way into the very texture of the novel, which becomes the story of a friendship as much as the account of the conversion of New Mexico to the rigours and regulations of the One True Faith.
But the drama arises too, as it does in Marilynne Robinson’s work, between the world as it is, as we see it, and the fabled shadow cast by the Bible. For both novelists the very landscape of North America, and how it came to be peopled after Columbus, suggest, in ways both direct and surprising, various books from the Old Testament. As Fr Latour, in Cather’s novel, moves between Laguna and Acoma in New Mexico, trying to spread and organize the faith, he sees ‘great rock mesas’ that resemble ‘vast cathedrals’. As he moves into the mesa plain he notices that it ‘had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the material for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together . . .’
Later, when he sees a rock whose summit had once been inhabited, he thinks of the Testament both Old and New. ‘Christ himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of his Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands – their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them.’ Soon, as he goes along, he thinks ‘that the first Creation morning must have looked like this’. It would be hard to write this, I think, in Germany or south Sudan, as you travelled through the landscape, or even in County Cork, not to mention the Home Counties. It seems America lends itself to this sort of writing, indeed this sort of belief. This would come to have significant political implications, but in the small matter of art, it would also be a gift to an American novelist interested in religion.
Gilead, Home and Lila dramatize the lives of a small number of characters who appear in all of the books, focusing closely on one or two of them in each novel. Although there are references to the wider community in the small Iowa town of Gilead, Robinson hasn’t attempted to create a Middlemarch, or a panoramic view of the society. Instead, the three books concentrate fiercely, and indeed lovingly, on just two households, those of the Reverend John Ames, and his lifelong friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, with flashbacks in Lila into the eponymous heroine’s life before she came to Gilead and married Ames and had a son with him. Gilead takes a strand from Middlemarch and turns it around. Ames, like Casaubon, is old, dry, bookish and alone when he marries Lila. The novel, however, is told from his tender point of view, narrated as death approaches to be read by his young son when he grows up. It begins gently:
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.
Ames’s tone is both wise and engaged, without the stuffiness we associate with poor old Casaubon. He writes about his father and his grandfather, about strange things he witnessed, and about religion. Religion fills his life; Robinson doesn’t have cumbersomely to remind us that he has been a Congregationalist minister; she allows Ames’s belief in the scriptures to offer an energy to the rhythm of his thinking. Here he is describing a photograph of his grandfather:
It shows a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it, staring down the camera as if it had accused him of something terrible very suddenly, and he is still thinking how to reply and keeping the question at bay with the sheer ferocity of that stare. Of course there is guilt enough in the best life to account for a look like that.
That last sentence has a melancholy acceptance of the fact that we live the aftermath of the Fall, that we’re sinful, but it doesn’t make too much of the notion; it doesn’t feel like something the author thought of and then gave to Ames because she felt she should. It’s intrinsic to the way he sees the world – not as an afterthought or an imposed thought but as an easy thought.
Making religious thought easy is part of the genius of Gilead. Ames has been preaching all his life; he is interested in what truth sounds like and in finding further images for it. Robinson has found a meditative tone for him that can allow in anything at all, including casual observations of each day and serious speculation about the afterlife. The tone is helped by a faint urgency mixed with sweetness and regret as Ames realizes he may not have much longer to live. Unlike the narrators, say, of Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer or J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, who are also both close to death and whose tone grows heightened and sharp and staccato in the face of extinction, Ames remains calm. But he shares with those narrators a particular eloquence, which the reader is made to feel has been given to him now in the light of his old age, and a more poetic tone than he might have used earlier in his life. But it is the memory of life rather than the thought of death that animates Ames. And his life has been enriched by his friendship and discussions about theology with Robert Boughton, whose family becomes the focus of Robinson’s third novel.
In Home, Boughton is old too, and widowed, when his daughter, Glory, and eventually his wayward son, Jack, come home. Just as Robinson is prepared to take great risks in placing religious belief at the very centre of a character’s being – not as something that will animate the plot, but as something as ordinary and fundamental to a novel as money or love – she now takes the risk of making Glory very dull indeed and her daily routines and concerns in her father’s house as tedious to herself as they almost are to the reader. Glory is, at one level, one of fiction’s least interesting creations. Yet she slowly exudes an inner power, a light, almost like the woman in a Vermeer painting or an early Velázquez painting or a Margaret Laurence novel. Her presence becomes persistent; every detail of her consciousness is etched into the prose. All she really does is regret her life, look after her father, read a bit and listen to the radio, and worry about her brother. And yet that is enough to give the novel a bedrock of closely observed drama. In both Gilead and Home, Robinson has a way of making nothing much matter, of filling things with gravity and grace, and then offering them depth. She has a seriousness about her characters that helps defeat their solemnity and helps to distract us from what is almost an aimlessness, a looseness, in the plotting of the novels.
The real drama in Home arises when Jack returns. In Gilead, we saw his return from the point of view of John Ames. Jack casts a shadow over Ames’s general serenity:
Glory has come to tell me Jack Boughton is home. He is having supper in his father’s house this very night. He will come by to pay his respects, she said, in the next day or two. I am grateful for the warning. I will use the time to prepare myself. Boughton named him for me because he thought he might not have another son and I most likely would not have any child at all.
While Jack, who has been in trouble with the law, becomes a sort of fixation for Ames, as Ladislaw does for Casaubon in Middlemarch, the context is as much religious, or mysterious, as it is sexual. Ames writes to his son:
My impulse is strong to warn you against Jack Boughton. Your mother and you. You may know by now what a fallible man I am, and how little I can trust my feelings on this subject. And you know, from living out years I cannot foresee, whether you must forgive me for warning you, or forgive me for failing to warn you, or indeed if none of it turned out to matter at all. This is a grave question for me.
That paragraph would itself amount to a warning. Perhaps I can say to your mother only that much. He is not a man of the highest character. Be wary of him.
Ames muses over Jack’s antics as a child, his slyness, his loneliness, his sadness and the small mean thefts he committed.
Then he started doing the things that got his name in the newspaper, stealing liquor and joyriding, and so on. I’ve known young fellows who spent time in jail or got themselves sent off to the navy for behaviour that wasn’t any worse. But his family was so well respected that he got away with it all. That is to say, he was allowed to go right on disgracing his family.
It emerges that Jack fathered a child out of wedlock and the child died. Ames writes: ‘I have never felt he was fond of me,’ while noting later that Jack’s own family ‘really loved him’ and his siblings ‘would stand up for him no matter what’.
Jack has been away for twenty years, had not even come home for his mother’s funeral. Finally returned, he is damaged, unsettled, unsettling. He waits for letters that don’t come; he leaves the house for no reason; his sister doesn’t know what’s on his mind. He is a nuisance, and yet oddly innocent and uneasy and endearing. Robinson charts all this with patience and skill and, at times, amusement. The scene in which the Boughtons invite the Reverend Ames and his young wife and son to Sunday dinner is worthy of James in its use of minute movement and flickering change of atmosphere, and close also to Alan Hollinghurst’s work in the way it mixes comedy of manners with sheer social tension. There is a marvellous moment when Jack, at the piano, plays some hymns and then begins to sing, ‘I want a Sunday kind of love, a love that lasts past Saturday night,’ only to find that Lila also seems to know the words. They are interrupted by the Reverend Boughton, who, for a moment, sounds like the Reverend Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘I thought we might enjoy something a little more in keeping with the Sabbath.’
